Client: Labor Ready
Industry: Staffing
Solution: One DD460 Restorer
Company
Each year, Labor Ready dispatches approximately 600,000 temporary employees
to jobs in construction, manufacturing, hospitality services, landscaping,
warehousing, retail and more. Based in Tacoma, Labor Ready is an international
provider of temporary employees for manual labor, light industrial and skilled
trades, operating under the brand names of Labor Ready, Workforce, Spartan
Staffing, and CLP Resources. Annually, the company serves approximately
300,000 customers through its 887 branch locations in the United States,
Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Customer Challenges
At its Tacoma headquarters, Labor Ready’s data center backs up a
number of essential databases and applications, totaling between eight to ten
terabytes. Due to the nature of its business, the company needs to restore
data a few times each month, usually within the first two weeks after backing
it up.
Previously, Labor Ready handled backups with a traditional tape-based
solution. Though the tape system was relatively new, the combination of drives
and backup software didn’t meet the company’s reliability needs.
Namely, it took multiple attempts to accomplish a successful restore,
resulting in delays in retrieving important data.
“A drive would fail or a hiccup would throw restores off,” said
Jeffrey Zuniga, Director of IT Infrastructure. “We were trying to
restore 300–400 gigabytes, and problems made it a painful
process.”
Labor Ready began looking for a new strategy to stabilize its backup
environment. As a first step, the company replaced its backup software with
CommVault Galaxy™ from CommVault®, Inc. Initially, Labor Ready used
CommVault with its existing SAN infrastructure, but the SAN which was not
architected for backups, quickly reached capacity limits. Labor Ready had
originally earmarked the SAN to be used for production-type data, making it a
particularly costly method for backup.
The company needed a more cost-effective, reliable disk-based solution that
would enable it to back up at least two weeks worth of data and easily restore
it when needed.
Data Domain Solution
Labor Ready evaluated about half a dozen backup solutions. Based on its
recent experience with using its SAN for backup, the company was already sold
on the reliability of a disk-based solution.
After a thorough analysis of all its options, Labor Ready chose Data
Domain’s Capacity Optimized Storage for its exceptional reliability,
built-in redundancy, and attractive pricing. The company worked with Datec, a
Data Domain channel partner, to bring in a DD460 Restorer.
“Data Domain offered a more attractive price point than if we’d
gone with some of the lower cost solutions which used our existing SAN,”
Zuniga said. “We found that Data Domain working with our CommVault
Galaxy Backup & Recovery software could handle basically everything we
wanted to do. Plus, with Data Domain we could store more onsite than we
originally wanted — at a lower cost than competitive solutions. That was
very attractive to us.”
Business Benefits
With Data Domain, Labor Ready has met and exceeded its needs for backups
and restores, and has an effective solution as it looks to replicate backups
offsite in the near future.
Currently, it achieves 10x compression rates, allowing it to store data
onsite for a full month — double the amount the company had hoped to
retain onsite. Soon it plans to move completely to full backups, which would
optimize compression rates even further and contribute to safer recoveries. By
retaining more data onsite, the company eases its need and the costs for
offsite storage. Plus, it freed a EVA 5000 SAN to use for other purposes.
Labor Ready has also seen exceptional reliability with the Data Domain and
CommVault solution, logging nearly a 100 percent success rate with no staff
intervention. Whereas restores once taxed the data center administrators, they
are now able to restore rapidly and without glitches.
“As soon as we moved over to disk-based backups and restores, the
reliability factor went way up,” Zuniga said. “Data Domain has
been rock solid. It’s definitely an impressive technology.”
“We found that Data Domain could handle basically everything
we wanted to do, plus we could store more onsite than we originally wanted
— at a lower cost than competitive solutions. That was very attractive
to us.”
Jeffrey Zuniga
Director of IT Infrastructure, Labor Ready
