TXT e-Solutions reduces backup time by more than 50% using Cohesity

The Challenge

TXT protects approximately 80 TB of data while accommodating 10 TB of growth year-over-year. TXT manages its own IT infrastructure with an elastic hybrid model. The main workloads are hosted on-premises, but some of them, being cloud-native, are hosted on public clouds with a multicloud approach that integrates with both Microsoft Azure and AWS. Through Azure, TXT hosts the IaaS environments of some of its customers and also protects on-prem data to the cloud. Through AWS it provides specific services to customers in the Aerospace market, such as data protection for Flight Profile Optimiser applications.

The most valuable data for the company is related to financial information about the company’s systems, with a focus on the source codes of software development operations, including those generated by services provided to customers. In addition, financial regulations and GDPR require data retention periods ranging from one to 10 years, and customer demands in the Aerospace and Fintech sectors are equally rigorous.

Against this backdrop, the company was faced with ever-increasing difficulties in data management that forced the need for a major change. At TXT, data loss is not tolerable, as it can seriously jeopardise the company’s business continuity; the services and software products developed by the company represent its core business, so the business applications that work on that data are of crucial importance to operate successfully on the market. As a publicly-traded company, downtime is not an option and directly affects the bottom line.

The main challenge was to adopt an agile scaling strategy to accommodate rapid growth. The company also needed to resolve issues before the expiration of legacy platform license agreements, while improving Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

TXT was aiming for a single, modern data management solution that would fit in well with the company’s software-defined architecture, requiring its next data management solution to embrace a hyperscale and hybrid environment. The data management solution needed to guarantee secure and reliable data protection across the entire environment to support efficient data management with fast restores.

The Solution

TXT has been a customer of Cohesity since 2018. Initially, it operated with a three-tier infrastructure and was looking for secondary tier storage to host data protection workloads with a long-term archiving strategy. The company started with a complex legacy configuration and was interested in a modern solution that would enable it to run its operations in an efficient, hybrid, and multicloud manner. At the end of 2021, having transformed its main data centre infrastructure into a hyper-converged platform, TXT decided to rely completely on Cohesity for data protection, adopting DataProtect and replacing Veeam, the incumbent legacy solution.

Working in close synergy with Cohesity’s system engineers, TXT now utilises most of the data protection features of the Cohesity Data Cloud platform, enabling it to protect its on-prem and cloud workloads, including collaboration environments such as Microsoft 365. TXT relies on Cohesity’s backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and file and object solutions.

“Our IT infrastructure has gone through a huge transformation in the last three years, mainly related to the constraints imposed by multiple M&A deals and the resulting integration projects,” explains Azamat Uzhangaliyev, Group IT Manager. “We had to operate on a large scale and there was no other option but to do so with smart technologies and cost containment. We embraced the change, accepted the challenge, and completely redesigned our infrastructure without undoing previous investments.”

The Results

By implementing Cohesity solutions, TXT has modernised its data management processes and accelerated backup and disaster recovery operations. This has resulted in measurable and predictable outcomes. TXT has increased scalability and flexibility, and administrative ease by relying on a single vendor for all data management.

The time required to perform a daily backup has been reduced from up to 32 hours with the legacy environment, to 12 hours today, while maintaining the same source and quantity of data. A full backup of 48 TB of data from the main data centre is performed in 12 hours, with an incremental backup of the same infrastructure in two hours. Recovery times have also shortened from 72 hours to just three hours. TXT can completely restore a 2 TB virtual machine in 50 minutes and find a file in the middle of 80 TB of data in 60 seconds, saving hours of work each week. “We have seen profound performance improvements in our recovery operations as we routinely run tests every month to measure KPIs,” Uzhangaliyev explains.

“The new normal sees us managing large-scale operations with unpredictable workloads due to rapidly changing business scenarios, even more stringent security requirements, and cloud-native trends that increasingly require best-of-breed approaches to be flawlessly supported. Hence there is a need to make operations smart, cost-effective and future-proof,” adds Uzhangaliyev.