BGC Slashes TCO by A$150,000 with Commvault: A Disaster Recovery Success Story

BGC Achieves Disaster Recovery Readiness and Slashes TCO by A$150,000 with Commvault

BGC, a leading Australian home builder, overcame data management challenges with Commvault, ensuring disaster recovery readiness and future growth.

Recovering data in minutes and saving a$150,000 in TCO

BGC is one of the largest home builders in Western Australia, and one of the largest annual turnovers of any privately owned company in Australia. Starting as a property developer in 1960s, BGC has expanded its operations into multi-faceted vertically integrated businesses. Its products and services include manufacturing building materials to building everything from houses to stadiums and providing heavy haulage services. This range of operations requires BGC to ensure its data is always available so it can meet market demands and support continuous growth. 

Previously, BGC used multiple backup solutions including Dell EMC Avamar, Dell EMC Data Domain, and IBM TSM. With data spread across on-premises data center, remote sites, and the cloud, it could take hours or even days for the IT team to recover a file, especially if it was a large backup. 

“We had trouble targeting everything (Oracle Cloud, Salesforce, Azure) with the legacy solutions. Now with Commvault, we have agents for every single platform. Commvault just ticks all the boxes,” said Adrian Lerch, System Engineer at BGC.

By replacing several legacy products with one Commvault data protection solution, BGC has eliminated the need to buy additional software or upgrade the entire system. The switch to Commvault also enabled the company improve RTO and RPO by 62% and recover data in just minutes, including Microsoft 365 and Salesforce requests. 

Disaster recovery right at hand

BGC’s wide range of products and services drives a massive volume of data—including mailboxes, construction records, and manufacturing specifications. Unexpected natural disasters like flooding and fire could pose a serious disruption to the business if the disaster recovery strategy was not ready. For example, compliance regulations require the company to keep construction projects extended warranties for more than seven years. 

“Some of the restores were not valid with the legacy solutions. I had to constantly take samples for the backups and spent time in recovery testing. It was a huge concern,” said Lerch. “Seeing how our data is growing exponentially each year, it would be a disaster managing our future data without Commvault.”  

Thanks to Commvault Cloud Autonomous Recovery, BGC simplified the process to monitor disaster recovery via the analytic tools embedded within Commvault Command Center™. This enabled BGC to easily verify if the lost data has been properly recovered every time. 

Saving time managing backups and recovery by tenfold

With strategic advice from Commvault Partner Lumen IT, the transition to Commvault Cloud Autonomous Recovery was simple and straightforward. 

“Commvault Cloud Autonomous Recovery simply matched 99% of our environment, so that’s a big bonus,” said Lerch. “With the move to Commvault, we didn’t need to modify our processes or take much additional training. The documentation is also easy to follow.” 

Lerch and his team can now focus on more productive work for the business, such as migration and system upgrades. This helped to cut time spent on data management by almost 10x.