Hyatt speeds backups from days to minutes

The Challenge

Hyatt uses data to improve its guest experience and operate its business. Yet the IT team at Hyatt was managing a complex IT infrastructure, including data centers in the Midwest, West, and Europe, that was collecting, processing, and storing more and more information. The data center in the West alone held 1.8 PB of data and was experiencing data growth of 20% per year.

To lower costs, Hyatt had virtualized 70% of its environment on Linux while running mission-critical applications on IBM infrastructure. However, the IT team experienced difficulty backing up its virtualized servers. Hyatt’s existing archival solution was unable to back up a virtual machine (VM) as intended, requiring multiple steps and often resulting in rebooting the server and causing unnecessary downtime. Hyatt looked to identify an agentless solution that would not require new hardware and could help Hyatt modernize its entire backup and recovery process.

The Solution

After evaluating many solutions, Hyatt chose the Cohesity data management platform as its software-defined solution to modernize backup and recovery as well as easily enable disaster recovery, business continuity, and cloud integration. With no technology renewal deadlines on the horizon, Hyatt had no financial incentive or hard deadline to update its backup infrastructure, but simply recognized the urgency and benefit to replace a myriad of legacy products with one modern solution to ensure simplified data management across locations.

Hyatt has initially deployed Cohesity—with approximate capacity for 350 TB of data—across its three data centers with three clusters in the Midwest and the West backing up more than 100 TB of data and over 350 VMs. Cohesity fully integrates with VMware vCenter using built-in technology including Change Block Tracking (CBT) and native snapshots.

The Results

After recognizing that Cohesity operates as much more than a backup and recovery solution, Hyatt began to leverage Cohesity for zero-cost clones for development and testing efficiency. With Cohesity, Hyatt has reduced the time for data replication from days to minutes. Hyatt also is seeing deduplication ratios of 4:1 in its Midwest location.

Previously, it was challenging for Hyatt IT to calculate RPO and RTO. With the former product, backup and restores took days, and now with Cohesity, they are completed within minutes. Hyatt establishes policies for data retention and then uses Cohesity’s simple, intuitive interface to easily set them. Moreover, Cohesity’s patented SnapTree™ snapshot technology makes it quick for Hyatt to recover and clone VMs. Cohesity uses VMware the way it was intended, and the data management platform’s ability to work directly with vCenter at the virtual machine disk (VMDK) level for agentless backups means there is no interaction or use of client OS resources. This enables the process to be faster, data easier to store, and leaves a very low footprint on vCenter.

Hyatt is considering Cohesity for more use cases and functionality, including migrating additional data to the Cohesity platform. According to Ted Stevens, Hyatt’s Senior Storage & Virtualization Engineer, “Cohesity’s native integration with third-party applications will continue to simplify our entire data management environment. We used to consider backup and unstructured data to be dark data. Cohesity opens up a whole new world of insights to begin to leverage backup and unstructured data for business value while solving mass data fragmentation challenges in the enterprise.”