Client: Thomas Weisel Partners
Industry: Investment Banking
Solution: Six DD400 Restorers and DD Replicator Software
Company
Thomas Weisel Partners is an investment bank specializing in the growth sectors of
the economy including the technology, healthcare and consumer sectors. Its value-added
Investment Banking, Institutional Brokerage, and Equity Research groups focus on
servicing U.S. and international emerging growth companies and institutional
investors.
With its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in New York, Boston, Silicon
Valley and Mumbai, India, Thomas Weisel Partners has approximately 550 employees.
Customer Challenges
Thomas Weisel Partners was encountering backup issues that were not uncommon for
multi-site enterprises. They were using tape to backup approximately 8 TB of data
located at four locations (New York, San Francisco, Boston and a small, but rapidly
growing site in Mumbai, India).
Weekly full backups initiated Friday were increasingly taking longer to complete.
Their restore speeds were not mapping to the company’s business continuity
objectives. “Our tape systems were 3 years old and we knew we wanted to improve
upon our data protection architecture,” says Kevin Fiore, Vice President, Director
of Engineering Services at Thomas Weisel Partners. “We decided quite early on to
make the move to disk-based backup. The availability of our data is really important to
us and we needed to get something faster and more reliable. We’d been working with
tape, and we were ready to start over.”
Beyond performance and reliability considerations, Fiore recognized that, in moving
to disk, there was an opportunity to eliminate the costs associated with contracts that
each site maintained for the transportation and vaulting of tapes for disaster recovery
purposes.
Fiore notes that their search for a new backup architecture was quite comprehensive
and covered many technologies, including VTLs (Virtual Tape Libraries) which
“quickly became pricey when we calculated required software license and ongoing
disk costs.”
During the evaluation period, solution provider Integrated Archive Solutions (IAS)
introduced them to Data Domain.
Data Domain Solution
The Data Domain implementation at Thomas Weisel Partners consists of a total of six
Data Domain DD 400 Enterprise Series Restorers. There are 3- DD430 Enterprise Restorers
for local backup/recovery installed at its New York, Boston and Mumbai offices. The San
Francisco data center at corporate headquarters uses a higher capacity DD460 for its
onsite backup and recovery.
For disaster recovery, Fiore deployed a combination of “many-to-one” and
“bi-directional” replication topologies, using a second DD460 in San
Francisco and an additional DD460 in New York. Data Domain’s DD Replicator
software was used at all offices to enable network-efficient replication between
locations. The DD460 in New York is used to create a replica set of San
Francisco’s local backup data. New York, Boston and Mumbai backup locally and then
replicate to the second DD460 in San Francisco. Each site retains data locally for a
minimum of 30 days. Once a month, data is consolidated to tape.
The massive data reduction resulting from Data Domain’s Global
Compression™ deduplication technology enables cost effective local backups for
Thomas Weisel Partners’ five offices. However, it also works in concert with the
DD Replicator Software to allow up to a 99% increase in network efficiency during remote
replication. Over and above the local reduction in data sets, the DD Replicator Software
polls the target site prior to the transfer of replication data. If the data exists
already, transmission of redundant data is prevented.
As a result of this topology, at Thomas Weisel Partners’ data is always readily
accessible for restores from at least two locations, offering the firm exceptional
disaster recovery protection. “Within an hour of backup, our data is in synch. We
know that, in some worst case scenario, our data is going to be available in pretty
close to real time. That’s fantastic for us.”
Business Benefits
Thomas Weisel Partners now enjoys a highly reliable and nearly instantaneous disaster
recovery capability that was impossible to attain using traditional tape-based backup.
The backup timing issues that first drove it to seek an alternative to tape have been
resolved, and its weekly backup window has been reduced to less than 24 hours. Fiore
reports that the lowest compression rate he experiences from any of his six Data Domain
restorers is 18x, this being on his largest capacity replication restorer in San
Francisco. All other sites maintain much higher compression rates.
With Data Domain, Fiore was given the lightning fast restore speeds he needed to meet
the firm’s business continuity objectives both locally and remotely, tremendously
cutting down the firm’s exposure to potential system and non-system based events.
In addition, with Data Domain, Fiore gained the flexibility to evolve his on-site
retention and backup methodologies to maximize the performance of his new architecture.
Centralized management and system automation have reduced the amount time he spends
managing backups at the four sites as well.
Finally, tape has been eliminated at three of his four sites and transportation and
storage of backup tapes is now a single monthly event (down from twelve times
monthly).
“Of everything that came out of this project, it’s the knowledge that our
data exists in two locations at all times and the confidence that it’s readily
accessible that I find most comforting,” says Fiore.
“Of everything that came out of this project, it’s the knowledge
that our data exists in two locations at all times and the confidence that it’s
readily accesible that I find most comforting.”
Kevin Fiore
Vice President, Director of Engineering Services
Thomas Weisel Partners
