“Perhaps most important of all, we know that our data is replicated to our contingency site within minutes, minimizing the risk of any disruption in IT functionality at our headquarters in London.” — Colin Everett
Head of IT Strategy and Architecture, Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets
O’Neill

O’Neill “Surfs” Through Backups and Recoveries with Data Domain

O’Neill has come a long way since its humble beginnings in a garage in California in the 1950s. The company’s boardriding products can now be purchased in retail outlets around the world as well as via the company’s European Web sites. Now headquartered in The Netherlands, the company employs more than 500 people. To reduce the time and resources required to backup and restore data, the company has deployed multiple Data Domain systems across five office locations. Thanks to an overall data compression rate of x18, O’Neill has been able to increase its online data retention time to a full year, has compressed its backup timing by over 50% and enjoys fast and reliable recoveries. In addition, the company stands ready to deploy a unified multi-continent DR system that will ensure its data and systems can recover quickly to keep its businesses running smoothly.

Customer Challenges

O’Neill’s supply chain is reliant on fast access to data. Details of new clothing collections, product orders from dealers and online shopping transactions all need to be protected against data loss and service interruption.

As the company has grown, so too has the volume of data that needs to be protected. With 57 terabytes of backup data to address globally, Peter Maljaars, Global Manager IT Service and Infrastructure at O’Neill Europe realized their data protection systems would soon become ineffective. “Our home office backups were taking more than 14 hours, which had the potential to impact our day-to-day business operations,” explains Maljaars.

With the company reliant on tape-based systems, the recovery process often involved retrieving tapes from an off-site location, which was both time-consuming and an unproductive use of the IT team’s time and energy. In addition, the O’Neill IT staff found that they had no sure way of knowing that data on tapes had not been corrupted during the backup process.

As O’Neill’s new Dutch owners made plans for further expansion of the brand, the IT department needed to find a way to not only reduce backup times but also increase the speed and reliability of restores and establish a bullet-proof DR strategy that would support their growth plans. “We needed a system that could solve our current backup issues and grow with us,” adds Maljaars. “It became clear to us that our tape systems were rapidly running out of gas. We wanted to re-invent our data protection systems and take a more global approach.”

Data Domain Solution

To address its challenges with tape-based backups and growing data volumes, O’Neill turned to Data Domain.

By first deploying a Data Domain DD565 system at its main office in The Netherlands, O’Neill was able to significantly reduce its backup times, increase the volume of data that can be stored on site to a full year and streamline its data restores. Additional deployments of 4-DD510 systems at remote offices have been similarly successful. Meanwhile the company’s 57 terabytes of backup data, which includes virtualized VMware data, has been compressed to just over 3 terabytes of raw disk space, making it more mobile so that network based DR can be efficiently deployed. Using Data Domain’s Replicator software, O’Neill will soon be able to implement cross replication and deploy Data Domain based disaster recovery capabilities across all sites.

“By achieving a compression rate of 18x, we can now store and backup more data with less hardware,” says Maljaars. “We can also instantaneously verify that our data is available for quick restores. As we deploy replication between headquarters and remote sites, the value proposition increases. We know we have plenty of room to scale our systems as our data grows, and we will eventually have a unified, fully automated data protection process across our offices.”

Maljaars cites ease of implementation as a key Data Domain strength. O’Neill’s first Data Domain system at its headquarters was up and running backups on installation day.

Business Benefits

The O’Neill IT team takes a “hands-on” approach to managing its IT environment and prefers to minimize its day-to-day reliance on vendors. Data Domain’s instantaneous verification of data availability, inherent reliability and the elimination tape handling has reduced the amount of time the team spends addressing its backup and recovery processes.

O’Neill’s DD565 appliance has already proved its recovery capabilities. As Maljaars explains, “Following a problem with our production environment, we were able to restore 250 GB of data within a couple of hours using the Data Domain system. If we’d had to search through tapes and try to effect this restore from our previous system, it would have been a protracted process. The combination of Data Domain and CommVault’s backup software made it simple and fast.”

The reduced timing associated with O’Neill’s backup process means that the threat of their backup window extending into the business day has been eliminated. In addition, the fact that they can now maintain a full year of backup data on-line virtually eliminates the likelihood of O’Neill ever having to restore from tape again.


“Our Data Domain system has helped us to respond more quickly and effectively to IT problems, which ultimately means less downtime for our offices and staff across Europe.”

Peter Maljaars
Global Manager
IT Service and Infrastructure