A leading manufacturer and distributor of building products for the industrial, infrastructure and residential markets serves customers worldwide from facilities in the U.S., Canada, China and Japan.

Guided by its mission to achieve best-in-class value creation and shareholder returns, this publicly-held company prioritizes operational excellence, product innovation and acquisition growth. To that end, the organization has acquired several small-to-medium companies that extended its diversified product line while strengthening its industry leadership.

Operating as a company of companies, the organization empowers its divisions to run their own operations, and strives to collaborate for the overall benefit of the company while bringing more value to its employees and shareholders.

Reducing complexity, increasing it collaboration

The IT staff of four provides overall policies and tools to help divisional IT teams support over 2,500 employees and around 1,500 computers at more than 40 locations worldwide. With responsibility for protecting the assets needed to run the company’s varied businesses, the IT staff safeguards about 100 TBs of data using eight different backup and recovery solutions.

“Supporting different types of data management systems makes everything more complex,” according to the director of IT infrastructure. “Dealing with space constraints was painful as we had to migrate data to tape and magnetic disk.” One staffer spent four to six hours daily addressing a myriad of backup and recovery issues, as concerns lingered about the risks of data loss should a system fail. These concerns were validated when a server failed during a system restoration following a major power outage. As the local team used backup software that no other site did, the IT team feared data restoration wouldn’t occur in a reasonable timeframe.

Luckily, the IT team was able to recover the hardware, but the outage put a spotlight on inefficient backup and recovery operations at locations not under Commvault control. Having previously deployed Commvault software for backup, recovery and archive to successfully protect and recover a subsection of corporate data, it made sense that the logical next step was to consolidate disparate divisional systems onto Commvault for a unified approach to data protection. However, before a broader deployment could be initiated, the company’s backup administrator left the organization, leaving the team to absorb up to six hours each day in backup administration. There was no way to do that with the company’s existing resources. Help was needed to reduce complexity and function better. When the team contacted partners for help, one of them recommended Commvault’s Remote Managed Services offering.

A managed services approach was well aligned with other support mechanisms in place as the company used managed services to simplify the administration of its Oracle systems. Having someone else deal with backup and recovery was appealing, especially when the company could turn to a trusted partner, like Commvault.

Managed services transforms backup and recovery

The organization initially planned to use Commvault’s Remote Managed Services (RMS) for six months—the amount of time estimated to hire and train a new staffer to manage backups inhouse. The IT team quickly found, however, that Commvault RMS was more than a stopgap measure. Productivity gains from offloading backup and recovery operations were immediately noticeable. According to the Director of IT infrastructure, “What we also got was a level of efficiency that we didn’t have before. Additionally, the accuracy of our tools improved considerably.”

With Commvault RMS, the company’s IT team now only spends about 15 minutes daily overseeing data protection. The company also has optimized performance by reconfiguring backups. In doing so, they alleviated persistent space constraints. “By setting up our backups differently based on recommendations from the Commvault RMS team, we don’t have to prune data like before,” the customer notes . “This enables us to recover data from disk, which is much faster than restoring data from tape. Now, we meet all our Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) on data restores without a problem.”

As a result, the organization extended its six-month managed services contract by another six months before signing on annually. “Even after we hired someone to handle backups, it was a no-brainer to keep Commvault Remote Managed Services,” recalls the customer. “We completed a host of internal projects since Commvault’s Remote Managed Services enabled us to get a lot of other things off our plate.”

Commvault also is helping to consolidate and standardize data protection onto one platform. “We’re bringing the rest of the organization into the fold, so everyone can get the same benefits with Commvault,” the customer adds. “There’s no way we could have tackled a project like this before. With Remote Managed Services, we’re on track to complete the consolidation by end of the year.”

Expediting resolutions, optimizing performance

To simplify organizational rollout, Commvault’s RMS team expertly configures, maintains and optimizes the software while reducing overhead as well as risk and complexity. “Prior to RMS, we probably spent three hours a week just on tech support calls,” the director of IT infrastructure remembers. “Now, most issues are resolved immediately and if not, the RMS team has direct access to Commvault’s developers. They can literally walk over to the dev team to get a patch, which is huge for us because the issues get resolved so quickly.”

The organization is also looking at improving overall data protection with disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) anchored by Commvault. “With Commvault as the delivery mechanism for all backup and recovery requirements, we’ll be able to take a step closer to enterprise-wide disaster recovery,” the customer adds. “As an extension of our team, Commvault is guiding our evolution to data management, which is a critical component of what we do to protect our operations.”

Quarterly business reviews led by Commvault RMS provide an excellent opportunity to share updates and strategize on future endeavors. “We can be more proactive and better planners now that Commvault’s team of experts help with design, implementation, governance and ongoing support. Without them, we probably wouldn’t have been as successful.”