Wavefield Inseis Case Study

Optimized VMware Backup and Protection

Wavefield Inseis is a Norwegian marine geophysical company that provides proprietary data acquisition services. The company offers a portfolio of non-exclusive multi-client data to the global exploration community developed in partnership with oil companies and governments.

Experiencing rapid organizational growth, the IT team at Wavefield Inseis implemented VMware technology to create a virtualized and dynamic IT environment that is easier to deploy and maintain, and utilizes resources more efficiently. In combination with this initiative, the company also needed to re-evaluate its backup and recovery strategy. Data Domain provided Wavefield with a cost-effective storage solution that optimizes the backup and protection of VMware environments.

Customer Challenges

“Since the beginning of 2006 we have grown from 20 employees to approximately 400 today,” says Jan Vidar Nordstrand, IT Manager at Wavefield. “If we didn’t have a virtual infrastructure, growing at this rate would have been a big challenge. Virtual solutions allow us to better utilize storage and dynamically grow the environment in terms of new machines (VM) and updates to operating systems.”

Once the virtual infrastructure was put into production, Wavefield recognized that it needed to re-evaluate its backup and recovery strategy to accommodate the relatively large amount of storage capacity need to support a VMware environment.

The team’s preference was to take a full image level backup of each virtual machine. From a technical perspective, VMware systems create a large VMDK file for each virtual server running on a system. Image-level backups capture the complete VMDK file on each backup. While this approach simplifies restore capabilities, it requires more storage capacity than Wavefield could afford in order to meet its 30 day online retention goal.

Data Domain Solution

Wavefield required a scalable backup and recovery system that could grow with them over time. The organization manages approximately 10TB of critical data today, with a growth rate greater than 25% each year.

Wavefield turned to its independent solution integrator Tomato, a reseller partner for VMware and Data Domain technology solutions operating in Norway, for advice. Tomato has significant experience in recommending and assisting its customers with deployments of VMware virtual servers in combination with Data Domain deduplication storage. On the advice of Tomato solution architects, the Wavefield team decided early on to consider elimination of tape for backup retention in favor of the higher reliability and performance of disk. However, the space considerations of preserving VMDK files meant that deduplication was a key requirement — and Data Domain was the recommended solution to work in combination with VMware systems.

Wavefield has since deployed Data Domain with VMware systems at its three main Norway offices, as well as on board the Geowave Endeavour vessel. Each site uses IBM servers on a SAN, running VMware ESX Server with approximately 110 virtual servers. Wavefield manages its data using a combination of Data Domain DD530 and DD510 systems, protecting back office applications data for IBM Domino, Microsoft Active Directory and Windows file system servers. Data Domain replication technology carries data from remote locations, as well as bi-directionally between two data centers for disaster recovery (DR).

The organization also uses Tomato Disaster Solution (TDS), a software solution for managing backup and recovery of virtual machines. Every night TDS takes a full image copy of VMware servers (VMDK files). These images are retained on Data Domain deduplication storage for 30 days, providing an exceptional DR solution for these critical servers. DR testing of a whole VM is now easy and non-disruptive.

Business Benefits

“We initially started with Tomato Disaster Solution and two generations of backup on a SAN disk, but it was just a question of time before we made the strategic decision to introduce Data Domain systems,” explains Jan Vidar Nordstrand. “We were initially skeptical, but the benefits were immediate and included the availability of ample amounts of storage for backup and recovery, full image backups every night, network-efficient replication and longer retention times for our backups. The systems have now run for over 6 months and they have been exceptionally stable.”

Jan Vidar Nordstrand continues, “Since TDS takes a full, consistent image of a VM and stores it on the Data Domain system, we can literally boot the server from Data Domain deduplication storage just to verify that we can we start a VM. This is fine for testing DR, or even for browsing individual files, directories or folders to make a file level restore. With the Storage VMotion feature inside VMware we will see great benefit in starting systems on Data Domain deduplication storage and dynamically migrating them to the production storage of our choice. Our DR times go from hours or even days to minutes. Tomato has helped us document all the DR procedures and they are regularly tested.”

The benefits achieved through virtualization are multiplied with Data Domain. Wavefield achieved savings in terms of electricity, rack space, cooling and network capacity. The Data Domain systems require virtually no administration and every time Wavefield adds a new VM, the team does not have to provision more storage to protect it adequately. Data Domain manages the job just fine.

“Replicating our nightly backups would have required a significant investment in network capacity and since we do not use SAN replication, we quickly saw the benefits of Data Domain’s deduplication and replication technologies,” states Jan Vidar Nordstrand. “It enabled us to use our office in Oslo, Norway as a true DR site. Now we are able to meet our requirements for getting copies of data out of the building, using existing bandwidth. Plus, we don’t have to manage tapes.”