San Francisco Giants Case Study

“We found Data Domain to be less costly than enterprise class VTL’s that provided replication capabilities and, of the vendors we considered, Data Domain was the only company that actually had its deduplication technology working… This is an incredibly effective backup solution that has saved us considerable time and money.”

Dave Woolley
Network administrator
San Francisco Giants

• San Francisco Giants Case Study (PDF)

A Major League Data Protection Upgrade

Working with Data Domain, The San Francisco Giants were able to eliminate their legacy direct attached tape backup system and quickly deploy a disk backup and network-based disaster recovery system that achieved their business continuity goals and enabled rapid system scalability. Today the Giants have fast, reliable backups and instantaneous restores that have enhanced service levels for their users. The administrative and management effort associated with their data protection has been minimized by the automation of backups. The Giants’ remote disaster recover system provides an additional measure of recoverability for their systems and no longer requires risky physical removal of tapes from the AT&T ballpark offices that are home to the team’s business operations.

Customer Challenges

With its Data Domain solution in place, network administrator Dave Woolley now prefaces any description of the challenges they faced with their previous solution with “Back in the old tape days…”

“We were already pushing the capacity of our tape system and our weekly full backups were taking about ten hours to complete,” says Woolley. “In the near term, we were faced with having to tailor our backups because we wanted to bring a variety of new capabilities on line that needed protection and fast recoverability. In the long term, our ability to scale our backup system just pointed to increased complexities. A restore was regarded as a day-long project because of the inevitable machinations associated with our tapes and drives and, given our location in the heart of an earthquake region, we’d been taking tapes offsite — which of course carries inherent risks. Our IT systems and the range of services the team and its management depended on us for had evolved and become quite sophisticated, but our tape-based backup system had run out of gas.”

The San Francisco Giants IT infrastructure supports both normal business operations for team’s management as well as some user services that are unique to a major league baseball team, such as its video coaching system and homegrown applications for monitoring stats and player rankings. “When Barry Bonds wants to see how he’s done against a specific pitcher in the past on an 0-2 count and what pitches the guy is likely to throw, files for our video coaching system need to be readily accessible,” adds Dave Woolley.

Data Domain Solution

The Giants first implemented a single Data Domain DD430 restorer appliance for local backup of a terabyte of data at its home offices in San Francisco’s AT&T Park. Within twelve weeks they were seeing an average 27x compression rate on their backup data sets.

The DD430 also gave them the capacity to improve their on-site retention time from eight weeks to about six months. Recovery requests are no longer an all-day affair. “Now, when we receive a recovery request, it’s instantaneous,” says Woolley, who also cites ease of implementation as a key element of his initial experience with Data Domain.

For disaster recovery, a second DD430 was installed at the team’s Scottsdale, Arizona spring training facility and Data Domain Replicator software was installed to enable vaulting of the team’s backup data from San Francisco via a standard T-1 connection. The nightly removal of tapes from the ballpark offices was eliminated and a secondary backup of the team’s data now resides well outside of the San Francisco earthquake zone. With additional workers and equipment at Scottsdale, data and functionality can be restored even if the data center in San Francisco was to sustain physical damage.

Business Benefits

With Data Domain backup and disaster recovery solutions, the Giants now have fully automated data protection processes that are saving its IT team administrative overhead and costs, and the team has exceptional business continuity capabilities in place. Weekly full backup timing has gone from ten hours to about three hours, restores from a day-long ritual to just a few minutes and the prospect of having to tailor their backups to meet the capabilities of their old system is long forgotten.

The business of baseball is something that the San Francisco Giants take quite personally and the success of the team is increasingly tied to the availability of its data and applications. Game stats, player rankings, scouting efforts and the video coaching systems converge with more traditional business applications to keep the team’s collective operations in full swing during the season — and in off season as well. As such, the selection of a new data protection solution was something that the Giants IT team took quite personally as well.

“It’s easy for IT vendors to sell PowerPoint concepts, but Data Domain has delivered on all promises made,” says Woolley. “We did our homework, initially looking at about 10 vendors’ solutions — including several virtual tape library options. We found Data Domain to be less costly than enterprise class VTL’s that provided replication capabilities and, of the vendors we considered, Data Domain was the only company that actually had its deduplication technology working. Finally, the fact that other IT managers we spoke to were enthusiastic about their Data Domain systems and that Data Domain’s technology was well grounded in numerous field-proven implementations sealed the deal. This is an incredibly effective backup solution that has saved us considerable time and money.”