Fred. Olsen & Co. Case Study

Re-architecting Data Protection Processes with Data Domain

Fred. Olsen & Co. carries on a tradition from 1848, when the Fred Olsen family first entered the shipping business. The firm is today owned by Mrs. Anette S. Olsen, fifth generation of the family. Fred. Olsen & Co. gives administrative services to Bonheur ASA and Ganger Rolf ASA, both quoted on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Anette S. Olsen is also the managing director of Ganger Rolf ASA and Bonheur ASA which, together with related companies and opportunities, are engaged in offshore drilling, tankers, renewable energy, cruise, IT, venture capital and real estate.

Having made the decision to virtualize its IT environment with VMware, Fred. Olsen used the opportunity to swap out its entire infrastructure all at once. In re-architecting its data protection processes, Fred. Olsen implemented Data Domain systems to streamline backups, accommodate rapid data growth, and ensure reliable system recoverability.

Customer Challenges

The IT team at Fred. Olsen was managing about 45 physical servers which created a lot of time and resource overhead. The potential benefits of server virtualization made sense to the staff. By consolidating the physical servers into a few large VMware ESX server systems, Fred. Olsen’s IT team planned to increase its respective utilization and reduce management overhead, while also saving physical rack space.

Fred. Olsen relies on Microsoft back office applications including SQL Server and Exchange, Windows file systems and a Blackberry server. The company also depends on SpecTec AMOS, an application that helps Fred. Olsen to manage the core logistics associated with the shipping industry. These systems are at the core of Fred. Olsen’s operation and critical to its business, so any new solution needed to easy integrate with each of the applications.

Adding to the challenge of ensuring systems availability, Fred. Olsen manages multiple terabytes (TB) of data with a growth rate of at least 30% per year. Further complicating matters, the company manages remote office operations and sites located on vessels en route from Europe to Africa. Each site makes local backup copies and then uses satellite links to carry daily full backups to the main office in Oslo, Norway.

Data Domain Solution

Most of Fred. Olsen’s physical servers were running outdated operating system versions. Therefore, it made sense for the IT team to swap out its entire infrastructure all at once. This included a swap of physical to virtual server systems, and re-architecting data protection processes including the adoption of Data Domain deduplication storage for efficient back ups and system recoverability.

“The decision to choose Data Domain was pretty simple,” explains Øivind Kristensen, IT Manager at Fred. Olsen & Co. “We could either acquire more expensive SAN disk for retaining our growing amounts of VMware backups, or we could invest in something smarter. Being able to replicate full copies of backup data from our regional offices was a big plus as well. It was a unique solution that could be leveraged to provide our remote offices with cost-effective DR.”

With the exception of only one server, Fred. Olsen has completed its transition to server virtualization for all applications and systems, and now runs on ESX Server systems in its Oslo data center. Data protection is performed using a combination of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), Data Domain deduplication storage via a DD565 system and Tomato Disaster Solution (TDS). Tomato is a reseller partner for VMware and Data Domain technology solutions, operating in Norway. Tomato TDS is a dedicated application for protecting virtual machines.

Fred. Olsen’s weekly TSM backup consists of approximately 1 TB data, and the total primary storage group on its DD565 system is effectively 22.2 TB (using about 3 TB of physical disk). Database backups are retained on the DD565 system for 14 weeks and file backups for 3 years on tape. TSM is used for file level and database backups and Tomato TDS for image backup of VMDK files. All data is written to Data Domain systems which allows the IT team to achieve maximum deduplication benefit across their entire environment.

The deployment model for remote sites also includes up to five virtual machines running on a single ESX Server at each location or on-board each vessel, and uses Data Domain DD120 systems for fast backups, reliability and deduplication efficiency.

Business Benefits

After just the first six backup cycles, Fred. Olsen experienced a 21x data reduction with Data Domain deduplication storage. This further yielded a 40x reduction of VMware images after 30 days of backups. Fred. Olsen was able to store the equivalent of 2.4 TB of raw VMware image backups to only 4 GB of physical disk space on the DD565 system.

“This was an amazing amount of efficiency,” states Kristensen. “It just shows how efficient Data Domain is at cleaning out the whitespace in VMware VMDK files.”

Operationally, the recovery process is also simplified and dramatically faster. “Tomato TDS gives us fast disaster recovery since the VMDK files are stored in their entirety on the Data Domain system,” says Kristensen. “This allows us to test our DR strategy anytime by simply finding the applicable virtual machine backup in the TDS GUI and by pressing PLAY. It is really that simple. We can either browse the VMDK file in order to find the files or folders which we require, or promote the running VMDK file from the Data Domain storage to our production SAN using VMware storage VMotion. It is a very simple process.”

As an environmentally responsible organization, Fred. Olsen also appreciates the dramatic reduction in their CO2 emissions realized from the combination of server consolidation with VMware and data reduction provided by Data Domain deduplication storage.