Britannia Building Society Case Study

A Model of Compliance and Efficiency

Britannia Building Society is the second largest building society in the UK. Based in Leek, Staffordshire, the company consists of the Britannia Capital Investment Group (BCIG) and member businesses. Britannia offers a range of financial services including mortgages and other loans, savings accounts and insurance.

The Data Domain solution enabled Britannia Building Society to better protect high-value customer data, allowing the company to replicate to an off-site data center for extra protection while eliminating the problems and risks associated with tape.

Customer Challenges

When regulations by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) mandated that Britannia Building Society adjust their data protection processes by moving backup data a prescribed distance offsite, the Britannia IT team had several options to evaluate.

Britannia could have satisfied the compliance requirement by opting to transport tapes to a remote site more than 10 miles away on a daily basis. But as Dylan Mathias, Unix and Storage Manager at Britannia explains, “Britannia is committed to being a model of compliance. The customer data we put in our systems is worth billions of pounds and we don’t want to put that data in the back of a van every day. In the UK, there have been a lot of reports about data loss incidents. We didn’t ever want to find ourselves in that situation.”

Prior to acquiring their new Data Domain system, Britannia was using StorageTek tape drives, and running backups from its data center to another local building. Beyond the new compliance requirements, the management complexities ongoing risks of data compromise associated with tape led Britannia to take a fresh look at how they were protecting their data.

With just 5 months to meet the FSA requirement and establish a remote DR site at least 10 miles away from the main data center, Mathias and his team found their long term strategy to eliminate tape from the entire backup environment being fast tracked by a near immediate regulatory requirement. The goal was to find a way to send backup data via a secure network, where it would be immediately available on the DR site.

Data Domain Solution

“During our evaluation process, Data Domain stood out in terms of the range of features it delivers,” Mathias says. “The Data Domain system had everything we were looking for and it was as cost competitive as any other product, even though it offers more technical advantages.”

Britannia deployed three DD580 systems at three different sites. Using Data Domain Replicator software and supplementary expansion shelves, the company was able to quickly deploy a secure and cost-efficient replication scenario that satisfied its DR compliance requirements and gave it a scalable backup and disaster recovery capability with fully automated processes.

The volume of data being written to Data Domain after the initial implementation was 33TB, including data from Oracle databases, Windows file servers, and email. Britannia expects to be storing as much as 334TB of data on Data Domain in the next year.

One of the main advantages that Data Domain offers Britannia is immediate remote replication of backup data to the DR site. Data Domain’s inline deduplication technology enables transfer of data to begin simultaneously with the backup process. With near simultaneous DR synching, risk to the data from system events or a disaster is minimized. Currently, the company replicates data from its two data centers to a third remote DR site, 140 miles from company headquarters, far exceeding the distance required by the FSA. If there is ever any problem at the main data centers, the Data Domain system at the remote site can be immediately used for recovery.

“Data Domain provided a great level of expertise and support, assisting Britannia in every way throughout the entire process,” Mathias adds. “Without this support, it would have been difficult for us to meet our deadlines.”

Business Benefits

Data Domain enabled Britannia to quickly meet and exceed the compliance requirements outlined by the FSA, while dramatically improving its data protection and security processes.

“Data Domain completely and permanently eliminates the need for tapes in our off-site backup solution,” says Mathias. “Since there is no removable media, there is no risk of media damage, theft or loss. All data is securely transmitted over a VPN in a compressed format to our DR site. This has eliminated the risk of our data being intercepted or compromised by external forces.”

Mathias continues, citing additional benefits: “Our new Data Domain systems deliver increased performance, improved capacity and the ability to recover data from our remote site as quickly as possible. In addition, Data Domain’s deduplication technology massively reduces the amount of storage required, which means less power is required and less heat is produced. There are no removable media or transportation costs since the data is transmitted over our existing communication links. The ongoing cost savings and efficiencies are numerous. It has also given us the opportunity to significantly increase our data retention periods, at absolute minimum cost, since the efficiency of deduplication increases the longer our data is stored on the appliances.”

“Implementing Data Domain for our local backups and disaster recovery has enabled Britannia to continue to be a model of compliance. We are now able to ensure immediate delivery of data offsite, exceeding FSA requirements and dramatically enhancing our business continuity capabilities in the process.”

Dylan Mathias
Unix and Storage Manager
Britannia Building Society