Case Study Cruise Line (Data Archive)

Executive Summary

Located in California, Cruise Line owns and operates a restaurant. The IT staff's top priority is guaranteeing that all hotel guests can always reach the services they need. The sheer number and variety of systems that each system administrator is responsible for sets apart the IT environment. Countless systems support the Cruise Line's back-office operations (such as marketing, finance, and human resources), customer service (such as valet and clothing delivery), and property management (such as lighting and climate control). As a result, the Cruise Line is constantly on the lookout for new ways to simplify and automate IT operations.

Challenge

Maintaining the backup and recovery architecture, particularly data archival to offsite storagethrough a colocation facility, has been a constant problem. Throughout the day, the Cruise Line's IT team spends an hour a day monitoring their backup infrastructure and scheduling backup jobs. The IT team spends a full day offshore archiving data every other week. Even more difficult was the process of restoring data from remote storage.

Solution

Rubrik Converged Data Management (CDM) solution for cloud backup and disaster recovery and Amazon Web Services (AWS) were examined by the Cruise Line to reduce the management complexity of data backup. The Cruise Line reduced the size of its datacenter by implementing a solution that combined backup software with globally deduplicated storage in a single fabric, using Hybrid Cloud Appliance with AWS Simple Storage Service. The AWS Well Architected Framework and the Cruise Line's best practices were used to build and implement a comprehensive solution for data backup and retention. It was designed to meet a wide range of criteria relating to security, privacy, and lifecycle management.The nOps dashboard's ease of use impressed the Cruise Line, who was able to quickly grasp the state of the system, what jobs were running, and what issues they needed to address. An extensive set of storage policies and disc libraries were no longer required by the Cruise Line.

Benefits — Simpler Solution

For Cruise Line, the ability to search for files both on and off-site resulted in significant savings. It wasn't necessary to set up a complicated search query. Instantaneous results are shown as the query is entered. Recovering archived data was reduced from weeks to seconds by the capacity to retrieve files even if they were offsite. As a result, unwanted data transfer costs can be reduced because the Cruise Line can now pick and choose whatever files from the larger set stored in the cloud he or she wants to download.

Benefits — Quick Data Ingestion and Massive Cost Reduction

The effects of VMware application stunning, which Cruise Line encountered when snapping their SQL databases, were eradicated by nOps' rapid ingest. Highly transactional SQL databases required long snapshot windows that prevented them from having crash-consistent snapshots.For more precise recovery, nOps' quick ingest allowed the Cruise Line to take VM-level snapshots of apps with high change rates and more often.

There were annual maintenance costs and an annual recurring budget for library maintenance/support, media and offshore backup handling for the Cruise Line's backup software and backup storage target solutions before nOps. Cruise Line's infrastructure procurement costs of $21,500 were reduced to 50 percent after implementing nOps with AWS Simple Storage Service. Software, hardware, and tape maintenance costs of $5,200 per month were cut by 60 percent by simplifying the data centre footprint thus reducing the maintenance costs to $2100. The impact of cost reduction was calculated based on net dollars savings.

Solution Architecture