The Westervelt Company

Founded in 1884, The Westervelt Company (www.westervelt.com) is a privately held land-resource organization taking an environmentally responsible, socially aware, Highest and Best Use (HBU) approach to managing nearly 500,000 acres of timberland and natural resources. Westervelt is growing its global network of sporting lodges, which currently extends from the United States and Canada to New Zealand, with potential growth in other parts of the world. The scope of the company’s businesses include a state-of-the-art Southern yellow pine lumber facility, mineral rights management, hunting and wildlife management, real estate including eco-communities, and ecological services such as mitigation, conservation, and species banking.

Accelerated Operations, Freedom from Tape

Data Domain is providing Westervelt with a backup and DR (disaster recovery) solution that frees them from tape woes and has enabled them to achieve exponential acceleration of their backup and restore processes. Their Data Domain system has delivered significant infrastructure savings as well as a dramatic increase in productivity that has enabled the IT staff to manage a major business change.

Customer Challenges

As a growing international land management company, Westervelt saw its enterprise data volumes growing substantially year over year. Protecting that data was becoming increasingly difficult with the standalone tape backup systems they were running. Plus, managing the tape media and getting it to and from an offsite storage facility was time-consuming and resource-intensive.

According to Michael Smelley, Senior Network Analyst and Administrator for Westervelt, “We were running backups to tape nightly and operators were carrying tapes to an offsite location the following morning. Sometimes we also used our internal mail carrier, but overall it was a very time-consuming and inefficient process.” Westervelt’s tape backup problems weren’t limited to the handling of tapes: the tape systems themselves were unreliable and becoming increasingly expensive. Smelley adds, “Like most companies, we had our fair share of issues with tape drives, tapes going bad during the process, and the like. Maintaining tape systems was very expensive. We maintain five weeks of full tapes and carried our most recent full backup offsite on a daily basis, plus we keep quarterly tapes and yearly tapes, so over time that adds up very quickly.”

In addition to Westervelt’s enterprise data growing at a fast clip and the mounting operational costs of tape, the company was implementing VWware virtualization software, which further increased the importance of establishing a fast, reliable and cost-effective backup and recovery solution. To address some of these issues, the Westervelt IT team initially looked at implementing a new tape library system. According to Rickey Grogan, Network Administrator, “We were running four standalone tape drives, one of which had gone bad on us. So, at the time, we thought perhaps a tape library system would work for us. A tape library was still going to require having someone onsite managing the system, but we thought it would have been a big improvement over the standalone systems.” In the midst of these decisions, the divestiture of a business division drove a substantial reduction in the core IT group, which still had the full range of enterprise data management issues to handle.

The Data Domain Solution

Facing resource constraints and an increased need for efficiency on every front, it became obvious that a tape library was not a viable long-term solution. The Westervelt team had to seek out the simplest and most cost-effective solution available-- and that brought them to Data Domain. According to Smelley, “A smaller operations team meant we needed a backup system that was a lot less hands-on. This drove us in the direction of disk-based backup and ultimately to the selection of Data Domain. We had already completed the cost justification for the tape library, so it was easy to justify the Data Domain solution, which carried approximately the same up front costs as the tape library.” Grogan explains, “It was a pretty easy decision to choose a disk-to-disk backup solution. The traditional methods didn’t have any kind of compression, and certainly not the kind of compression that’s possible with Data Domain. We also looked at systems from HP, Equalogic, and Quantum. None of them offered anything close to the capabilities of the Data Domain solution.”

The Westervelt IT team oversaw installation of their Data Domain systems in April 2007 and immediately began replicating their VMware virtual machines, Oracle databases, SQL Server data, and Windows file server data offsite via WAN, using Data Domain’s Replicator software. The installation was non-disruptive and the ensuing benefits spanned the full scope of their data protection efforts.

Westervelt’s Data Domain system dramatically simplified their data protection processes, first by reducing the amount of data that actually needed to be stored to disk, enabling lightning fast, reliable backup and restores. Data Domain also delivered a robust and flexible disaster recovery solution. “We had a facility that was just far enough away to qualify as appropriate disaster recovery site, but close enough for us to be able to drive there to test and implement our offsite replication target,” says Grogan. He adds, “We needed a solution to get the data from point A to point B and Data Domain provided a way to do that at a very low cost. So when our disaster recovery contract with an external provider came up for renewal, we didn’t renew.”

Business Benefits

Since implementing the Data Domain system, Westervelt has achieved 50x compression rates on VMware generated “.vmdk” files, and they have successfully restored a considerable amount of data from those files. Also, the IT team is now able to protect more of their enterprise data than before.

Whereas they previously backed up about 1.3 terabytes of data, they’re now backing up nearly 2 terabytes at no additional cost. They can also rest easy, knowing that the system requires less staff administration and management. Says Smelley, “We can run all of our backups and not have to worry about someone being here to take tapes out, or to be here on Monday mornings following holidays to transport those tapes, because our data is automatically replicated offsite.”

With regard to performance, Grogan reports, “I had to restore some Oracle databases, each about 70 gigabytes, which took about 20-30 minutes to restore. With tape that would have taken about two hours.” He adds, “We also tested the new DR system. In one case, we backed up and replicated a CRM server over night. I came in the next morning and, within 25 or 30 minutes, I had restored the server and had it online and working with users logged in and testing it. That was from start to finish.” Smelley adds, “And that was our very first test. We had never done that before. With more experience we expect the process to go even faster.”

In fact, the backup process with Data Domain is so fast that initially one administrator wasn’t certain the system was working. “We had one person do a restore and it went so fast that they thought it hadn’t restored yet or something went wrong with the job,” Smelley recalls. “When they ran it again they realized it had worked and that it was just super fast. People now realize how fast it is, and that they see the obvious benefits of not having to pop tapes in and out.”

These efficiencies enable a newly “lean and mean” IT staff to manage their workload and be more productive. According to Smelley, “Users count on our operations staff for daily restores. Our people no longer have to spend the time keeping up with the tape cycles, keeping track of which tapes need to be shipped off site, or worrying about tapes being overwritten and so forth. Now they’re able to spend that time doing other projects.

The only challenge for them now is adjusting to how quickly restores are happening and believing that they’re really done!” He adds, “Not having to deal with tapes and transport them offsite was critical for us in managing our way through a challenging business change. This was a deciding factor in our choice of Data Domain.”

The Westervelt team is now reveling in its newfound freedom from tape. Smelley observes, “As a company, we’re very big on what we call continuous process improvement – making it faster, better, easier – and the Data Domain solution was a home run in that regard. In a very short time, we’ve gone from 100 percent tape backup to less than 5 percent. Over time we expect to eliminate tape altogether.”

Looking back at the process of implementing disk-based backup, Smelley observes, “With all the products and systems we’ve purchased over the last year, Data Domain and VMware stand out as having delivered on their promises. Nowadays, when you talk to technical support with most companies, you’re either put on hold or given a two hour callback, and you’re often working with people who may not be very competent or easy to work with. The Data Domain technical staff is not only very good at what they do, but extremely responsive. We’ve been pleased with the very personal service we’ve received and it’s been nice to be able to get right in touch with someone and resolve an issue in minutes rather than a couple of days.”

“As a company, we’re very big on what we call continuous process improvement – making it faster, better and easier. The Data Domain solution was a home run in that regard.”

Michael Smelley, Senior Network Analyst and Administrator, The Westervelt Company

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