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Organizations today face significant challenges in managing the cost, complexity and capabilities of their backup systems. They need simple backup and disaster recovery solutions that are optimized for their environments, help reduce costs and offer a quick return on investment.

My team recently worked with a large insurance company in India that had just refreshed its IT infrastructure and relocated to a new data center. Its IT team was now ready to explore solutions for backup and disaster recovery. To help the insurance company evaluate its options, IBM Systems Lab Services did a consultation demonstrating the value of IBM Storage solutions and helping the client explore how well they might fit its backup landscape.

Why do a storage optimization consultation?

There are many advantages to doing a storage consultation like this one. When the Lab Services Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure team conducts such a consultation, it includes the following steps:

• Capturing the current environment and identifying gaps
• Identifying use cases and technologies that could benefit the client
• Conducting a workshop to validate the use cases and to present and discuss possible target architectures
• Submitting a report with recommendations for products, technologies and architectures the client likes

To help the Indian insurance company understand and improve its data protection landscape, Lab Services thoroughly researched its “as-is” environment and then scheduled a workshop to discuss findings with the client’s IT and management team.

Workshops are designed for active client participation. Participants from the client’s side engage in the discussions, explaining why their architecture was put in place and often concurring with the limitations. Then, together we come to a shared understanding of challenges the client is currently facing. We discuss use cases and technologies from IBM that could be leveraged to overcome these limitations. Business challenges and growth goals are also discussed before we arrive at a high-level target architecture.

Selling versus telling

Our approach in Lab Services is to articulate how a client’s infrastructure limitations and other challenges can be overcome using appropriate IBM technologies. The discussion aims to uncover the ideal target state that can meet your requirements.

With this goal in mind, we don’t just present the features and functions of the product. Rather, our consultants focus on explaining how adopting certain architectures or technologies can directly address your real-world challenges.

For the insurance company in India, we emphasized disaster recovery rather than focusing just on backup. During the workshop, the client IT team expressed concerns about its past reliance on tape storage, which it found difficult to operationally manage. We discussed alternate architectures using disk storage as a target, as well as deduplication features that would help optimize the capacity of the disk storage.

Benefits to the client

Storage optimization can help clients address their current paints points with backup and restore. In this instance, the proposed solution replaces the client’s current fragmented backup solutions to a single enterprise backup solution. It eliminates operational issues with backup to tape and tape management, which were reducing the operational window of the company’s applications. A completely disk-based, application-aware backup solution eliminates tape storage and reduces the insurance company’s backup window from 36 hours to 8 hours.

The proposed solution also provides faster restore to help the client meet service level agreements (SLAs) with its business units. Storage optimization ensures that the most appropriate backup methodology has been deployed based on each data type to back up the data in its native format. Quick recovery of the desired data in the native format again helps clients meet their SLAs. This results in improved uptime of applications and faster response to users, which drives higher user satisfaction and business benefits.

Finally, optimized storage helps make a company future-ready to address data and backup on the cloud.

Finding a trusted backup and recovery solution isn’t easy. But consulting with leading storage experts on how to optimize your storage infrastructure can provide peace of mind. Contact Lab Services today to see if we can help your organization with a backup and disaster recovery project.

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