EFI Case Study

Client: Electronics For Imaging, Inc (EFI)
Industry: High Tech
Solution: Two DD200 Restorers and One DD460

Company

Foster City, California-based EFI (Nasdaq: EFII) is the world leader in digital imaging and print management solutions for commercial and enterprise printing. EFI’s award-winning technologies offer end to end, integrated document management tools from creation to print, including high fidelity color Fiery® print servers that can output up to 2000 ppm; superwide digital inkjet printers and UV and solvent inks capable of printing on flexible and rigid substrates; powerful print production workflow and management information software solutions for increased performance and cost efficiency; and an array of corporate printing solutions. EFI’s integrated solutions connect seamlessly, delivering unbeatable performance, cost savings and increased productivity. EFI maintains 25 offices worldwide.

Customer Challenges

Feeling squeezed by the labor-intensive processes of managing more than 20TB of data on tape libraries and looking to cut the ongoing cost of tape media purchases, the IT team at EFI began looking for less labor intensive and more cost-effective alternatives to managing their backups.

EFI’s IT staff was spending eight-to-12 staff hours per week managing tape backups. In addition, requests for restores of end-user data were frequent. In late 2004, the management team began looking for more efficient, cost-effective backup solutions as they had many more pressing projects for the IT staff than babysitting labor-intensive tape backups. One of the primary goals was to keep eight weeks of backups in readily accessible nearline storage so that they could perform speedy recoveries without having to get tapes from offsite storage. Specifically, the team was backing up Direct Attached and SAN-based Storage that contain home directories, data generated from the Software Development team, and various QA test files.

EFI Purchase Criteria
Client Pain Issues	Data Domain Solution
Backups took too long to complete and were too labor intensive	The DD200 enabled client to shorten backup windows by 35% and freed up labor intensive resources
Management desired less costly solution; tape media too expensive	Data Domain enabled EFI to save tens of thousands of dollars annually on tape devices

Data Domain Solution

Hearing of Data Domain through trusted reseller partner, InterVision, EFI launched a two-month pilot program to test the technology. The pilot went so well that they not only purchased their pilot unit, but they purchased a second unit as well. Their initial strategy was to purchase the two DD200 Restorers they piloted, and trade them in for a DD460 when the new product was released. But when the DD460 came out, they decided that they would also like to keep the two DD200s. They now own three systems and plan to add additional units at remote offices.

Alternatives Considered

The team needed a solution to backup more than 20 TB of Direct Attached and SAN-based data storage and considered several SATA disk-based backup solutions. None of these solutions, however, used Capacity Optimized Storage, which gave Data Domain the competitive advantage.

Data Domain Benefits

EFI now has a more streamlined, efficient and less labor intensive process for managing backup and recoveries of important internal data. The time IT staff once devoted to managing tape backups, is now freed up for other projects, and since tape is now only used for archival purposes, they have changed their tape backup policy from weekly full backups to monthly full backups, but still do weekly full backups of some data. Overall, they have shortened backup windows by more than 35 percent and EFI has seen immediate cost savings by recycling old tapes and not purchasing new tapes. Further, with Capacity Optimized Global Compression ratios of 15x, EFI is able to store up to two months of data in nearline storage, thereby enabling fast restores.

“With the DD460 from Data Domain, we’ve been able to compress and store two to three months of backup data onsite. We’ve cut costs and reduced our reliance on offsite tape storage, and we can back up and restore data at incredible speeds. Best of all, we can easily verify the security and integrity of our data. We’re very pleased — the DD460 is everything we’d hoped for.”

Ephraim Baron
IT director at EFI