Quantium selects Cisco and Cohesity for enterprise data management with impressive space efficiency

The Challenge

Quantium manages more than 6 PB of data company-wide in two main datacentres, with exponential data growth for a growing company. Managing and protecting big data is not only at the heart of the IT team, but the core of its business. Quantium had pieced together backup and recovery in its environment with numerous platforms, and stitching together reliable backups was becoming more and more cumbersome, as well as leading to frequent failures. Quantium recognised the industry was moving away from servers with heavy storage and compute and toward a hyperconverged data management solution.

Quantium has a large Cisco environment, managing workloads with Cisco UCS across Windows servers, an Apache Hadoop server farm, and running Nimble for primary storage. The company had outgrown its Unitrends solution for backups, and the challenges and issues were beginning to affect performance and impact disaster recovery capabilities.

As science is the core of Quantium’s business, backing up to primary storage carried too much risk, was a waste of resources, and a poor way to use primary storage. After attempting to restore a server from a Unitrends backup, the IT team uncovered that some backups had corruption, and the technology was not even able to alert that the backups were not successful. The IT team realized it needed a solution and reached out to its reseller and Cohesity to implement a Proof of Concept (PoC).

“We realised that we had spent a great amount of time trying to build a solution that needed to rely on numerous magical pieces of a puzzle that we were trying to fit into a perfect world,” explains Taylor. “This scenario was not reality, and that was where Cohesity came in and provided an all-in-one platform that not only resolved our current pain points, but scaled for future requirements. At Quantium, we prefer to bring in innovative solutions to ensure we will not out-pace the technology. We also want to leverage Cohesity to address the issue of data volume and mass data fragmentation in the enterprise.”

After a successful PoC, Quantium deployed Cohesity to back up essentially all of Quantium’s data, including workloads on SQL databases, network file shares, and all internal production systems.

The Results

After implementation, Quantium was able to consolidate numerous backup targets and methodologies into a single, unified solution with Cohesity software running on Cisco UCS servers. Quantium consolidated Unitrends, custom SQL agent backups, and SAN snapshots. In addition, four backup targets of NAS, direct-attached storage, primary SAN, and an NTFS file server were consolidated for tremendous operational efficiency across the entire environment. As a preferred platform for compute, Cisco UCS servers seamlessly integrate with Cohesity and enabled further consolidation. With Cohesity’s global deduplication and compression, Quantium is seeing 20x reduction—an impressive level of space efficiency for optimal cost.

One large network drive that used to take four days to back up only took 12 hours the first time with Cohesity, nearly half the time of the legacy environment. Corporate Windows file servers took more than 24 hours for a file level backup, but now complete in under eight hours.

The IT team would sometimes spend two or three days trying to just locate a file. With Cohesity’s unique, Google-like global search capability, this process is down to minutes and has freed up considerable staff resources for value-add activities. Quantium previously dedicated a senior IT staff person to more than 20 hours per week to address backups, while today a junior engineer manages the Cohesity solution in 80% less time.

Quantium is also using Cohesity for NAS, as a backup target for its Apache Hadoop environment.

In the next six to 12 months, Quantium will look to back up Office 365, as well as leveraging data archival to the cloud. Quantium will use Microsoft Azure to move data to the cloud, and back on-premises with Cohesity. Quantium will soon consider using the platform as a NAS mount, SMB file share, and explore potential synergy with Cohesity Marketplace.