HNL achieves ROI in 12 months, adds protection to Microsoft 365 with agile dev/test

The Challenge

After the multi-year modernization of its data center to a Nutanix-based hyperconverged infrastructure was complete, HNL’s legacy backup solution needed to be overhauled or replaced entirely. The company faced a costly, forklift upgrade of its legacy Veeam system to make it fit into the new, security-conscious, software-driven environment. HNL was also in need of a new archiving platform that could support the company’s rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To avoid making significant investments in capability-limited solutions, HNL sought to modernize its data management approach. HNL investigated newer, comprehensive solutions that promised greater simplicity, better scalability, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). “Trying to rework legacy products to fit next-generation data center models just adds complexity and cost,” said Harvey Guindi, HNL’s Chief Information Officer.

HNL needed to protect four on-premises workloads: virtual desktop infrastructure; always-on clusters of Microsoft SQL server; general-purpose Windows servers; and a Sunquest lab information system running on IBM AIX, which needed both bare metal and application-level backups. Then there was Microsoft 365 in the cloud—which includes all of HNL’s rapidly growing OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint data—whatever backup solution HNL chose needed to be able to protect this data as well. Guindi also had two technical requirements: he wanted the solution to create immutable backup copies of data to protect against cyberattacks, and to store them using an air-gap model. He narrowed the candidates down to Rubrik and Cohesity. After eight months of research and then subsequent testing, HNL chose the Cohesity Helios data management platform.

The Solution

A key factor in HNL’s decision to select Cohesity was that it was built for on-prem and cloud to do so much more than traditional backups. “We wanted greater protection and greater control of our backup data. We also really wanted to be out of the file share space and use cloud solutions such as SharePoint and Teams,” explains Guindi.

Today, HNL uses Cohesity to simplify and boost its traditional workload, objects, and Microsoft 365 data protection—which encompasses the SaaS-based productivity apps as well as SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive data—as the lab moves away from traditional NAS infrastructure. HNL has been able to perform SharePoint recoveries using Cohesity when users mistakenly deleted files. It has also recovered SharePoint servers with configuration changes that didn’t take well, and rolled back planned upgrades.

“Cohesity is a great way to perform backups which we are required to do to demonstrate retention,” says Guindi. “For example, we keep four weeks of daily backups on Cohesity and monthly and yearly backup replicas on AWS for seven years. For other applications, we have specific rules and keep them for 20 years.”

The deployment of Cohesity has been a win for the HNL dev/ops team. Cohesity is now baked into internal processes that team members can create sandboxes and development environments easier and faster than native applications or tools could. If developers want to replicate a database or server, they use Cohesity’s zero-cost cloning feature rather than the native tools inside of SQL server or VMware. “This is definitely speeding time to market,” says Guindi. “Cohesity is far more than just a traditional backup and disaster recovery solution. It’s integral to our everyday operations,” he says.

HNL’s dev environment is heterogeneous. “Cohesity makes it a breeze to move between two different hypervisors because it sits in between and sees everything,” says Guindi. “We can take a VM backup, image, or snapshot from one environment and move it or replicate it to the other, so it acts almost like the data integration layer.”

The Results

Previously, HNL had no data visibility, and no second-use data capabilities or capacity. Its backup solution was just an insurance policy. “You pay a price for legacy,” says Guindi. “You have performance, security, and expandability challenges. You completely ditch all of those negative aspects when you’re going with a modern solution like Cohesity.”

At HNL, just three people are responsible for the organization’s enterprise data center and cloud solutions, including Cohesity, whereas the team would have needed at least three more people if it had kept supporting the legacy products. There were also no opportunity costs as a result of the switch. In fact, the opposite: the team now takes on a lot of projects that it otherwise would not have been able to manage.

Looking ahead, Guindi says, “We expect to expand protection of our Microsoft 365 data, particularly data in OneDrive and SharePoint, that will continue to grow steadily—even after the pandemic—and we will look to the Cohesity platform for sure if and when restores of that data are needed.”