Dealing with vast sets of sensitive data on a daily basis can create considerable secondary storage requirements – a challenge faced by many companies today, including Germany’s largest lottery provider, WestLotto.
For WestLotto, solving its secondary storage problem meant finding a solution that could renew its existing VM backup solution while increasing performance and reducing backup and recovery costs. The 60-plus-year-old company is additionally the control center for the transnational lottery Eurojackpot, including 18 European countries. In 2017 alone, WestLotto processed nearly 187 million game transactions!
Cohesity’s data protection solution would eventually help WestLotto with its secondary storage challenge, but not before the company ticked through its list of requirements and did its due diligence. Top among WestLotto’s required secondary storage solution features:
- Allow company to develop new products faster.
- Ability to clone complex and interconnected IT systems, when required by the test department.
- Reduce backup and restore times while ensuring better service and availability.
After extensive market research, WestLotto narrowed its vendor list to just a few potential partners. Within this shortlist, the usability and management of Cohesity was rated as outstanding.
Based on an extensive proof-of-concept project, WestLotto selected Cohesity and its partner Computacenter over a well-established market leader in backup and recovery for virtual environments.
Positive Results:
Since deploying Cohesity, WestLotto is seeing many positive results such as:
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- Reduced backup and recovery times by up to 98 percent.
- In the past, the IT team needed a day to recover a mission-critical gaming transaction server. Thanks to Cohesity, this task now takes a little over 15 minutes.
- The volume of data being processed and written onto the tape libraries by WestLotto’s legacy system reached several terabytes every day. Thanks to Cohesity deduplication, the data volume has been reduced to less than 100 gigabytes/per day, resulting in considerable savings.
- The Cohesity solution is scalable for the future.
- The pay-as-you-grow model offers competitive value from a management point of view.
WestLotto has been able to alleviate the complexity of its legacy backup and recovery solution and reduce its rising costs. Cohesity allowed WestLotto to shrink its recovery time for a mission-critical gaming transaction server (1.5 TB Linux VM) by up to 98 percent, from over 24 hours to a little more than 15 minutes.
For WestLotto, choosing Cohesity meant not only providing its customers and users with the highest level of security, privacy, and discretion throughout the game process, but also having access to a complete, well-rounded solution with capabilities that include global dedupe, global search, and virtual machine (VM) cloning.
Cohesity allows deduplication across workloads: SAP, Oracle, DB2, MySQL. These workloads run on Linux / Window VMs (vSphere) and physical servers, which are consolidated on Cohesity DataPlatform.
WestLotto also wanted to find ways to develop products faster while reducing the time spent on backup and recovery. WestLotto deployed four Cohesity C2500 hyperconverged node appliances in each of its data centers, with Cohesity DataProtect backup and recovery software and Cohesity DataPlatform. The Cohesity test/dev and cloning capabilities help the WestLotto team accelerate the development of new applications.
Since deploying Cohesity, life has vastly improved for WestLotto’s IT team, which is now able to concentrate on applications and availability for its customers, not on backup and restore!
