Anana selects Cohesity for data management and reduces backup times by over 98%

The Challenge

The company found the combination of its ever-growing storage hardware and its existing backup solution had become overly complex to manage. With the growth of data and introduction of new data sources that needed backing up, the legacy platform wasn’t providing the efficiency and features required.

One of the problems that Anana faced with its previous platform was the fact that it wasn’t able to efficiently back up TDE encrypted SQL databases. After encrypting SQL databases using Transparent Data Encryption, the backup process was not deduplicating data properly, resulting in it backing up around 50 percent of data per database when running full backups. This translated into greatly extended backup times and the threat of not meeting RTO and RPO targets. The company needed a better solution that would back up SQL databases efficiently.

The Solution

Anana’s platform supports contact centre agents with access to sensitive customer information through a single agent experience. Anana’s back-end environment comprises large SQL databases and increasingly uses VMs, with IT operations spread across three sites: a primary instance at headquarters, with two active data centres for redundancy.

Anana faced and met its storage management complexity challenges when it turned to Cohesity to simplify and optimise its data management. The company is using Cohesity DataPlatform and DataProtect with clusters at three data centre locations, including the deployment of DataPlatform Virtual Edition at its head office.

Alongside day to day challenges of maintaining performance, resiliency, and recovery, its IT team also supports consultants, and dev and support teams with a range of services including database cloning, snapshots, and reporting.

The Results

Anana eliminated performance issues with backing up encrypted SQL databases and has seen tremendous benefit across its operations since deploying Cohesity.

With Cohesity, the performance of backups changed from hours to minutes for the daily incremental backups for SQL instances. Anana now uses a backup schedule that combines incremental backups running hourly and log backups running multiple times an hour depending on customer requirements. With Cohesity‘s Change Block Tracking capability, backup time has been substantially reduced, and Anana is saving approximately 240 hours per month in SQL instance backup times alone.

Anana consultants and reporting teams are using Cohesity’s advanced Microsoft SQL Server data protection tools to safeguard data. Anana uses the clone database feature to trial platform changes for dev and test workflows. Now the IT infrastructure team can provide developer access to databases without the need to wait for the full restoration of a copy. Anana no longer has to wait for hours to restore a database to test schema update scripts, but can complete this action in seconds, and minimise the sprawl of data copies for development purposes.

Previously, when consultants wanted access to databases that were significant in size, restores were taking more than 10 hours, due to the fact that data was being restored to slow storage designated for testing. With Cohesity, the underlying storage is no longer a problem because clones are spun up immediately and run directly off Cohesity nodes. Cohesity’s ability to clone databases reduces time to access data to less than one minute in many instances, delivering a tremendous improvement.

Simplified data management saves time and creates efficiency, allowing the IT team to delegate simple clone and restore operations to development teams and consultants. It is easy to train new staff on how to use it even for those without previous knowledge of administering backup platforms.

Anana will continue to expand its use of Cohesity. To provide space for expansion and to allow for new customers to come onto its platform, it seamlessly added two additional nodes per cluster after the initial deployment without disruption. Anana aims to stop using Windows Server Failover Clustering to provision file shares and plans to migrate existing shares to Cohesity SmartFiles to scale-out NAS high availability.

In addition, the company will expand Cohesity for disaster recovery (DR) operations. In addition to being a consumer of services, Anana also collaborates with Cohesity on improving new features. Recently Anana and Cohesity worked on a new SQL migration feature that allows a large database to be staged to a new SQL server. By testing and providing feedback Anana helped Cohesity to release a new and improved version. Customer feedback can help shape the development of the product to suit the business.