I had another great discussion with a Data Domain customer- Bryan Wilken, VP of IT for Bank Midwest:
Tony: Can you give us any examples of how Data Domain provided real value to your company?
Bryan Wilken: e have completely stopped using tapes in all but one of our systems, and we’ll have that on the Data Domain in the next few weeks here. The bank now has a more robust and fault-tolerant back-up system. It runs automatically every night and it doesn’t require the need of employees to change tapes and take them home. We’re also seeing a 23-to-1 compression ratio, or de-duplication. And restores have been handled quickly and effectively by the IT department. We no longer have to wait to have tapes either brought back in or reloaded and reread before we can restore data.
Tony: Can you tell us how Data Domain has improved the overall economic effectiveness within your IT operations?
Bryan Wilken: The Data Domain disk-to-disk system is saving Bank Midwest in tapes and drives alone around $13,000 a year. Plus we have the security risk that’s been eliminated without having tapes that are leaving the bank’s premises. As I mentioned, we have moved to virtualization of our servers. We hadn’t first planned on this, but we are now backing up our VMware servers nightly to our Data Domain and then replicating them to our DR site. Another added layer of protection in case of a disaster.
Tony: Would you recommend using Data Domain to other IT professionals? And tell us why.
Bryan Wilken: Yes, I would. What I liked about Data Domain as we’ve gone through installing this product, is that the solution worked just as the vendor claimed it would. We’re also getting the compression rates that they claim and it was just an easy set-up, and it’s worked from the day it was installed. That’s the kind of products I like to purchase for Bank Midwest.
Bryan validates the Data Domain value proposition with 23-to-1 data dedupe, fast and reliable recoveries, reduced management overhead of tapes, reduced security risks, enabled disaster recovery - and fundamentally it was easy to set up and put into production.
I think it is interesting to note that this is yet another customer that is completely eliminating tape.
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