Transforming Backup: CoStar’s 75% Success Boost

In search of scalable, reliable backup for growing data

While managing backup is part of Oje Alexis’s job, it began to feel like his whole job.

“Every day was fighting fires,” says Alexis, senior systems engineer at CoStar Group. “That’s literally all I did for about two years. It got to a point where I had no confidence in our ability to protect our data.”

CoStar leads the market in commercial real estate information, analytics, and online marketplaces. Ranked 29th on Fortune magazine’s annual list of the 100 Fastest-Growing Companies, CoStar reported 19 percent revenue growth last year. The company’s ever-expanding data sets strained its previous backup solutions: Veritas Backup Exec, Quest vRanger, and Idera SQL Safe Backup. On average, backups succeeded only about 55 percent of the time.

And unfortunately, Alexis had little confidence in getting help from the legacy vendors. “I knew the product better than the support team,” he says.

From three backup solutions to a single screen

Alexis and the team began their search for a new data management solution with partner CDW and a review of the solutions on the Gartner® Magic Quadrant. They chose to evaluate Commvault, EMC, and Veritas Net Backup against their wish list of requirements.

In proofs of concept, Alexis said Veritas Net Backup felt overcomplicated while EMC never succeeded in actually backing up data. Meanwhile, a demo of Commvault Cloud clearly showed the solution could meet the CoStar backup needs while reducing complexity.

“We saw how simple it was to set up a quick backup,” Alexis says. “With Commvault, it’s all right there on one screen.”

Comparatively, EMC would require five different screens to configure a backup job. Alexis and the team had already been toggling between several screens across its incumbent solutions.

Quick, actionable insight

Teaming with Commvault Professional Services, CoStar devised a way to cover its very segmented network and ensure backups didn’t traverse the firewall.

The company now replicates backups between multiple data centers. They back up file servers directly to the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and send auxiliary copies to the cloud. For a few critical resources, CoStar retains tape copies on-premises.

With Commvault dashboards and reporting, Alexis gains quick insight into critical factors such as data growth, license usage, and inactive clients. With actionable data from Commvault, the team can shift resources or stop backing up machines no longer in use.

In a refreshing change, Alexis knows that seasoned support is just a call away.

“Commvault support is collaborative,” he says. “We work together toward a solution. It’s a huge difference.”

The results

According to Morra, one of the key benefits of using Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect is the ability to easily allocate and store data in a different and virtually-isolated location.

Thanks to the full integration with Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery, Optima can now backup and quickly restore data in Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect via a single interface, the Commvault Command Center. This helped reduce the time to transfer terabyte of data to the cloud and improve RTO considerably.

“Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect is an essential tool in helping us to meet data protection compliance requirements,” said Morra. “The built-in air-gapped cloud security and data isolation capability with Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect ensures our customer data is secure and available if there is a ransomware attack or natural disaster.”

By using Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect, Optima also saved significant hardware costs to build an internal replication solution.

“Traditionally, we would have to buy a new server and implement an associated network for a replication tool. With Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect, we have completely avoided additional investments in infrastructure,” said Morra.

Optima plans to include the migration of services to the cloud when necessary and safeguard the entire core information system in the private cloud with Commvault and Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect.

“The combination of Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery and Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect gives us unlimited scalability in protecting our critical data, and benefits from ongoing support,” said Morra.

Now ‘More of an architect’ with Commvault

In moving to Commvault, CoStar saw the backup success rate jump from around 55 percent to 97 percent.

The company also condensed 11.2 PB of data down to just 2 PB of disk space through deduplication. On SQL, however, they’re gaining a 10X deduplication rate.

“Without deduplication, there’s no way we could manage 11 petabytes of actual data on disk for backups,” Alexis says.

With Commvault, CoStar saw RTO drop from 24 hours to just an hour for disk and under four hours for tape.

Most noticeable, however, is the impact to Alexis’s workday. Instead of six hours a day troubleshooting storage, he spends an hour or less – and sometimes has nothing to troubleshoot.

“Because of the huge improvement in backup with Commvault, my job role has changed,” he says. “I went from putting out fires to being more of an architect.”