Case Studies
Case Studies

EVault Shrinks the Backup Window

Apotex, which is located in Toronto, Ontario, is the largest Canadian-owned pharmaceutical company. The company produces more than 180 generic drugs in about 450 dosages and formats, filling about 40 million prescriptions in Canada each year. In addition to Canadian sales, the company sells its drugs in 115 countries worldwide.

During the past 25 years, Apotex has seen a lot of change. The company has grown from two employees in a 5,000-square-foot building to more than 4,000 employees who occupy two million square feet in facilities around Toronto and in several other Canadian cities. Understandably, the company's IT infrastructure grew right along with the company as well as its need to store critical data.

Backup Tapes Prove Costly

Not too long ago the Apotex backup environment resembled a league of server nations. Each building had a backup server and performed nightly backups. Collectively, the company was backing up about 500 gigabytes of data on 70 distributed servers grouped into four operating systems: VMS, Novell, Windows NT and Unix. A different backup product was used for each operating system. Backup servers connected to two types of tape media-either DLT or DAT media. Apotex employed about 15 tape backup devices and the media library contained almost 1,000 tapes.

These tapes had to be maintained through various retention cycles. At one point, Apotex was spending an incredible amount on media--$250,000 a year! Naturally, the company wanted to eliminate the inherent costs of buying media, storing it offsite and licensing backup software. In addition, the time involved in doing a file restoration was proving to be problematic. The company needed a backup technology that would conserve storage space to reduce the backup window despite storage growth, cut the restore time and to minimize media and offsite storage costs.

Instituting a D2D Backup System

In January of this 2002, Apotex went live with its first phase of its D2D backup system. The first phase included backing up all of the Windows NT/2000 servers. The second phase calls for backup of Sun Solaris servers.

EVault Software Key to Solving Backup Dilemma

The secret to Apotex's backup solution is the backup software used. The company licenses the Windows-based software EVault developed for its online network backup service. EVault, which is a leader in providing online electronic backup and recovery solutions, has been providing its service since 1997.

EVault's delta technology shrinks the backup window dramatically by copying just the changes, not the entire file, since the last backup for that server. From the initial backup on all servers onto the SANs, EVault created a mapping strategy in an index file. Each time a backup occurs, EVault looks for files that have block changes, and then locates those changed blocks, compresses and encrypts them and sends them over the wire. The time required for a backup has been drastically reduced. A 50-gigabyte file now takes about 20 minutes rather than the several hours when Apotex was using tape.

Restorations are just as easy to handle as the backup process. Within a matter of minutes not days, Apotex technical staff can turn around requests for restores. System administrators bring up the EVault restore window, which works like Windows Explorer. The process is as simple as selecting the type of files, directories, or entire drives being restored from, and then answering a couple of questions about where to place the data. The files on the SAN then get forwarded to the designated server location or to remote servers.

Since implementing the D2D setup and the EVault agent software, Apotex has been able to streamline its backup process. The company has one dedicated backup person, and EVault handles the rest by providing a report on the process of the backup tasks being done automatically. These individuals no longer have to do manual tape intervention tasks, such as mounting tapes, sending them offsite, retrieving them, and keeping track of where they are.

The D2D server backup combined with EVault's solution has more than paid for itself by cutting media costs, shrinking the backup window, freeing up IT personnel, and conserving storage space.

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