Case Study: Brennan IT

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area network solutions, through managed IT, helpdesk operation and ... For Ken Jeffreys, cloud services manager at Brenn
Case Study: Brennan IT COMMVAULT DELIVERS SCALE AND DATA TRANSPARENCY TO UNDERPIN BRENNAN IT GROWTH

Industry IT & Telecommunications Service Provider Corporate Headquarters Sydney, Australia www.brennanit.com.au

CHALLENGE • Brennan IT experienced significant growth in demand for its managed IT services, and consequently a rapid increase in the data under management. It needed a data management platform that could automate the data management and backup in order to maximize managed services margins while offering IT executives a window on the infrastructure and data. • Meeting the expectations and SLAs of Brennan IT customers requires an ability to be immediate in responding to customer needs or issues if they arise. They needed to partner with an organization that was committed to enabling a responsive and reliable environment. • Brennan IT expects continued strong growth and required a scalable platform in lockstep with the company’s own steep growth trajectory, while remaining committed to the R&D investment needed to embrace emerging enterprise technologies. SOLUTION The Commvault Data Platform and Huawei OceanStor hardware delivers a highly scalable platform to manage internal backups and backup-as-a-service for clients. Partnering with Commvault’s Enterprise Support Program to fully optimize platform potential. BENEFITS • The original business case ROI for the Commvault solution was delivered rapidly, and the data platform has continued to scale and deliver robust and reliable data management, as well as clarity around the infrastructure and data visibility. • Rapid growth in Brennan IT – which has seen the data volumes under management double in just 18 months– has been managed seamlessly, supporting a scalable environment for future growth. During this scale-out period, personnel resources required to manage the platform have remained constant, allowing Brennan IT to achieve margin objectives for its services • Its partnership with the Commvault Enterprise Support Program has enabled Brennan IT to maximize their investment in the data management platform and align with Commvault’s innovation roadmap that caters to emerging enterprise technologies. • The platform may be extended to manage Brennan IT’s Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service offering, allowing both internal platform consolidation and greater leverage of internal skill sets.

RAPID GROWTH DELIVERS DATA CHALLENGE Brennan IT is a fast growing and award winning IT managed services provider, focused on meeting the needs of Australia’s burgeoning mid-market enterprise sector. The company delivers a broad range of managed IT services ranging from private IP networking and wide area network solutions, through managed IT, helpdesk operation and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Over the last 18 months, demand for the company’s services has risen strongly and the volume of data being protected daily as part of the hosted, cloud and on-premises services (including backup-as-a-service), has doubled to 280 Terabytes over the last 18 months. Brennan IT is expecting a similarly steep growth trajectory in the future; Australian technology analyst Telsyte has already forecast that demand for Infrastructure-as-a-Service will grow by 16 per cent a year to the end of the decade. For Ken Jeffreys, cloud services manager at Brennan IT, having an automated data platform able to deliver transparency and flexibility in how data is stored, managed and protected, while delivering the opportunity to scale rapidly is essential. Given the nature of Managed Services, this platform required extensibility to be able to offer new billable services to its customers, while maintaining highly efficient operations in order to accurately predict costs / margins. A legacy Arcserve system, which did not provide the scalability that Brennan IT needed to support the business growth, required considerable manual intervention and experienced occasional failures. As such, the service provider sought an alternative solution that would enable the company to grow, while maintaining the exceptional levels of service that their clients demanded. The company issued a tender, and from a shortlist of vendors including Commvault and Symantec, selected the Commvault solution, primarily because of its comprehensive data management capabilities and market leadership.

A COMPLEX TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE Brennan’s technology landscape is complex and stretches across 1,700 virtual machines in its server farms. To manage the complexity and volume of information, the company implemented Huawei OceanStor hardware and the Commvault Data Platform, which together provide a robust and scalable storage platform for software controlled, large server farm backups. The solution handles protection of VMware, HyperV, file servers, Microsoft Exchange and SQL agents and multiple other agents residing in Brennan IT’s Sydney and Brisbane data centers. Nine physical nodes – five in 2

5 Steps to Go Beyond Efficient Data The right data management platform can achieve efficiencies across both data protection and cloud management efforts.

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Sydney, four in Brisbane – are managed by the data platform, with each city’s data stores replicated to its partner city for full data redundancy and assured business continuity. Brennan IT uses the Commvault remote web console to create a CIFS share folder on the storage system and maps that to the Commvault Media Agent to deliver a simple, speedy and straightforward orchestration and protection process for customers. The OpEx model they offer allows for tailoring and configuring to specific customer needs and application requirements. “Without the strong integration and simplicity of Huawei and Commvault it would be challenging to protect the sheer volume of data that we have,” says Jeffreys.

ENTERPRISE SUPPORT PROGRAM ENABLES INCREASED ROI To ensure Brennan IT could fully realize the benefits offered by the joint Huawei and Commvault solution, they partnered with Commvault’s Enterprise Support Program (ESP) to help design and deploy the solution. The depth of knowledge of the ESP was essential to the project’s ultimate success, according to Jeffreys, and also resulted in critical skills transfer into Brennan IT. “The Enterprise Support Program is quite unique. I can’t think of any other Tier 1 vendors that have that sort of offering. Often you’re working with vendor partners who don’t have that same level of deep expertise about the data management needs of your business,” he says. “The ESP team was able to build that trusted advisor relationship, helping to both deal with low level technical issues, and provide strategic direction in our overall development roadmap.” The response times and escalation under the ESP were also impressive says Jeffreys – 15 minutes for a Sev 0 issue, 30 minutes for Sev 1 – ensuring any challenges were tackled rapidly and effectively so as not to impact Brennan IT customers. The 18 month engagement has also significantly reduced the number of support tickets, thanks to knowledge transfer and expert advice from the ESP. “Another benefit of working with the Commvault ESP and Huawei was having access to the key R&D development teams, knowing that any feedback, product fixes or development requests were escalated and actioned quickly. This means we can continue to develop and improve our offerings to customers, while maintaining key performance indicators to help achieve our SLAs.”

“The Enterprise Support Program is quite unique. I can’t think of any other Tier 1 vendors that have that sort of offering... this was a big change and we haven’t looked back since.” KEN JEFFREYS Cloud Services Manager at Brennan IT

A WINDOW INTO THE DATA Brennan IT has been able to minimize downtime, now measured in minutes, and reduce the risk profile both internally and for its clients by both ensuring regulatory compliance with regard to data access in the multi-tenancy 3

environment, and delivering a platform that would actually support the business growth and enable them to embrace disruptive technology.

BRENNAN IT AT-A-GLANCE

Jeffreys is clear that the main benefit of the platform is the transparency that it delivers. “It’s not speed that’s the important factor – although it certainly helps with network efficiencies – it’s being able to manage that much data with clear visibility,” says Jeffreys.

PLATFORM/FILE SYSTEM

Brennan IT also benefits from Commvault’s advanced de-duplication technologies, including client-side de-duplication. This has reduced the amount of data under management through optimized data compression rates. It’s also about the ability to scale – and in that regard the Commvault data platform “is boundless” he says, underpinned by the simplicity and scalability offered by Huawei OceanStor hardware. Jeffreys says that the return on investment foreseen in the original business case was quickly achieved, adding that additional value of the solution comes from the ease with which it scales to meet growing demand. “This was a big change and we haven’t looked back since,” says Jeffreys.

• Microsoft Windows • Linux APPLICATIONS • Virtualization (Hyper-V + VMWare) • Exchange • SQL • Sharepoint HARDWARE • Huawei OceanStor 9000 • HP Servers

FUTURE PROOFED FOR SCALE AND INNOVATION With an eye to the future, Brennan IT is already planning its migration to the latest version of the Commvault Data Platform, which will ensure that the organization’s environment is kept current, and prepared for the introduction of Windows 2016. It will also provide important updates for handling VMs in the Azure cloud. Jeffreys says that they are working to build out their offerings and the extension of the Commvault data platform to handle Brennan IT’s Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, further leveraging the investment in the solution and the data platform skills its staff has attained.

Commvault delivers a single, holistic solution enabling you to recoup efficiencies in the cloud and lower your operational overhead throughout your infrastructure. Learn more at commvault.com/gain-efficiency.

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