Reducing Backup Windows and Increasing Performance When Data Reaches the Terabyte Range

Grand River Conservation Authority [GRCA] is one of the largest watershed management agencies in Canada, managing water and natural resources for nearly 40 municipalities and close to a million residents. When databases reached the terabyte range, the organization experienced difficulty meeting required 24-hour backup windows. GRCA had been through four purchasing cycles, including a disk-to-tape backup and a disk-to-disk-to-tape solution and still couldn’t meet designated backup windows. After calculating a deficit of over $400,000 in productivity if one month’s data was lost, they knew it was time to solve their backup and recovery problems, leading them to deploy a flash-optimized storage solution which allowed GRCA to reduce RPO from 1 day to 1 hour, but also reduce backup windows, eliminate tapes and store 6+ years of file shares.

Learning Objectives

How to manage backup windows when your database reaches terabyte levels
Recovery best practices and the significance in reducing RPO times
How snapshot replication can eliminate the need for tape backups that require constant management
The importance of having a tool to continuously monitor sensitive data and provide storage analytics, specifically when working with small IT staffing compliments