Desjardins chooses Cohesity-Cisco solution for faster backup and recovery, simplicity, and automated data management

The Challenge

Desjardins has been meeting the banking, wealth management, and home and auto insurance needs of Canadians for over 120 years. Known as an industry innovator for its willingness to adopt new technology solutions, Desjardins made the decision to back up its VMs to Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) storage several years ago. This traditional backup solution performed adequately at first, but it was getting increasingly difficult to manage the environment as the company grew.

The Solution

The IT team started looking for a better solution in 2018. “We chose Cohesity because of its simplicity and superior automation capabilities,” said Amico.

Desjardins deployed Cohesity on Cisco UCS servers. The jointly-developed Cohesity-Cisco solutions simplify data management—backup, archiving, disaster recovery, file and object services, dev/test, and analytics—and unlock limitless value from data. “When we found out that Cisco was an approved Cohesity partner, our decision was made,” admitted Amico. “Another reason I chose Cisco was that they had an all-flash option. They also offer Cisco Intersight, a SaaS management platform, which meant I wouldn’t need to install an internal management application on a server – I could manage everything in the cloud.”

The Cohesity and Cisco UCS C-Series configuration is integrated with Cisco Intersight, a SaaS hybrid cloud operations platform which delivers intelligent automation, observability, and optimization for traditional and cloud-native applications and infrastructure. “Having Cohesity managed through Intersight is a huge plus for us,” noted Amico. “Cohesity and Cisco keep everything simple and automated from a software and hardware perspective. The two solutions work very well together.”

Desjardins’ IT team has already migrated 30% of the VM backups to Cohesity, and plans to move the rest over in the coming year. “Our goal was to operationalize Cohesity gradually, swapping in workloads one at a time,” Amico explained. “We currently store a lot of years of historical data. That data exists in many different configurations and the management scripts have changed over time. By bringing our VMs in one at a time—using a self-contained, organized approach with limited access—we were able to regain control of our infrastructure and document it correctly.”

The Results

The simplicity of the Cohesity and Cisco solution has enabled Desjardins’ IT team to work on more strategic projects. “Instead of worrying about backups from an infrastructure perspective, our team can now perform client validations,” noted Amico. “We look at each client and ask, ‘Why is the server running for eight hours? Let’s fix that before we move it to Cohesity.’ With the ability to troubleshoot issues and optimize the environment proactively, we’re seeing a lot fewer support escalations.”

Backups are also much faster on the Cohesity platform. “We were never able to back up one of our native Windows file servers in under 12 hours. With Cohesity, that data is now replicated and moved to our remote site within three hours.”

With the faster backups, Desjardins’ project groups are no longer impacted by lengthy outage windows. “The improvements we’ve seen in our service level agreements have been very impressive,” said Amico. “Our SLA success ratio went from 92.5% to 99.975% on Cohesity and Cisco UCS.”

“One of the biggest gains we’ve gotten from Cohesity is the assurance that we’re backing up all of our VMs,” explained Amico. “Cohesity automatically backs up the entire cluster, so we know we aren’t missing anything. In the event of an infrastructure issue, we know we’re covered and can be back in business almost immediately.”

Desjardins plans to start migrating all of its SQL workloads to Cohesity and Cisco in the next few months. The IT team will be using Cisco spindle-based UCS servers for the VM backups and deploying Cisco UCS all-flash servers for the database backups. “We just completed the PoC for our database backups,” said Amico. “We currently have databases that take longer than 12 hours to back up. After seeing the results of the PoC, I’m confident we’ll be able to complete each of them with Cohesity and Cisco in under six hours.”

Amico appreciates the ability to run backups and NAS on the same Cohesity platform. “Even though the clusters will be separate, they’ll be running on the same high quality software platform,” he noted. “Providing uniformity in terms of infrastructure and management gives you simplicity. Combined with the industry-leading Cisco UCS servers, the Cohesity solution is unbeatable.”