Client: Quicken Loans
Industry: Financial (Mortgages)
Solution: One DD200 Restorer, and One DD460 Appliance

Company

Livonia, Michigan-based Quicken Loans® is the nation’s largest online mortgage lender according to National Mortgage News. Quicken Loans employs nearly 3,000 mortgage professionals and closed nearly $12 billion in mortgage loans in calendar year 2004.

Founded in 1985 as Rock Financial by Dan Gilbert, the firm soon became one of the country’s fastest growing mortgage lending companies. In 1999, Quicken Loans began offering mortgage loans over the Internet.

Today, Quicken Loans consists of online lender Quicken Loans, Rock Financial, a Quicken Loans Company and Title Source, a title and settlement services company. Fortune Magazine selected Quicken Loans to its 100 Best Companies to Work For list. Its website www.Quickenloans.com has been named a “Best of the Web” mortgage lending site by Forbes, Money and PC magazines.

Customer Challenges

Given its large volume of client and team member email, Quicken Loans began looking to reduce the cost and increase the speed of their nightly full backups of their Microsoft® Exchange email server. With some 800GB of mail data, the Exchange administrators needed assurance that their data would be readily restorable. Specifically, they wanted to retain at least one week of mail data on nearline storage. Equally important, they wanted a solution that worked within their current data center environment without changing their core infrastructure of their backup platform.

Quicken Loans Purchase Criteria
Client Pain Issues	Data Domain Solution
Client needed simplified and more reliable backup solution with an extended data retention window.	The Data Domain® appliances enabled them to cost-effectively migrate to disk and store up to two weeks of data onsite.
Client desired solution that would work with their standard backup software — VERITAS NetBackup™	Data Domain supports all major backup software vendors including VERITAS NetBackup.
Client needed solution that would work with enterprise applications, including Microsoft® Exchange email servers and home directories.	Data Domain integrates well with enterprise applications such as Microsoft Exchange.
Client desired solution that would enable daily full backups of their business critical data.	The high compression ratios of the Data Domain appliances enabled Quicken Loans to migrate from Weekly Fulls and Daily Incrementals, to Daily Fulls.

Quicken Loans Evaluation Criteria

While researching solutions ranging from Virtual Tape Libraries to high-end NAS and SAN arrays, the IT team at Quicken Loans learned of Data Domain through a VERITAS news group. After finding the VTL, NAS and SAN devices to be too costly, they turned to less costly, appliance-based solutions. And Data Domain became part of the consideration.

Quicken then launched a five-week pilot with the Data Domain Restorer where they put the appliance through numerous restores and rigorously tested compression ratios. To their surprise, they achieved compression ratios of 10.4x. The administrators also found the small size of the Data Domain appliance to be an unexpected selling point as well: it could fit into limited physical space in their data center and would not require any extra electrical or cooling hookups.

Data Domain Solution

With its initial purchase of the Data Domain DD200, and subsequent purchase of the DD460, Quicken Loans keeps four weeks of Exchange backups on the DD460 and will be placing four weeks of database backups on the DD200 in the near future. They’re now able to restore their most recent email data in as little as 45 minutes vs. eight to twelve hours from tapes that may be located in an offsite location. That data is then duplicated to LT02 tape drives during the day using the Vault feature in VERITAS NetBackup.

Quicken Loans Business Benefits

Thanks to the purchase of the Data Domain recovery appliances, Quicken Loans’ data center is now augmented by a disk-to-disk backup solution for their Exchange email server they’re confident in. Some of their data can now be duplicated to tape less frequently, saving Quicken Loans the purchase of many tapes per year. This, by itself, was enough to justify the purchase of the Data Domain Restorers. The DD460 has also enabled the IT team to do daily full backups of their important Exchange data, giving them additional reassurance that they’ll have fast and easy access to their most important data in minutes, not hours.

In addition, they have cut their daily backup windows significantly, and they now have assurance that their mission-critical data is fully restorable. The new recovery appliance also ensures that internal users will experience no downtime during backups and restores.

“Thanks to Data Domain, we have confidence in our ability to restore mission-critical data quickly and effectively. With Data Domain, we’re doing full backups of our Microsoft Exchange Servers. We’re also able to duplicate that data to tape for longer retention periods, when necessary.”

Don Klebba
Storage Area Network Engineer
Quicken Loans

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