CASE STUDY
IN BRIEF
Industry
»» Manufacturing
Challenges
»» Inconsistent backup practices
across facilities
»» Difficulty with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)
compliance
»» Two-person IT staff spends too much
time managing tape backups
Solution
»» Whitewater 510 appliances at four
production sites
»» Amazon S3 cloud storage
Benefits
»» Saved $107,000 over three years
compared to tape backup
»» Saved 936 man-hours over three years
»» Restores in 15 minutes versus 8 hours
with tape
»» Improves SOX compliance
»» Effective DR strategy
»» No extra cost for business continuity plan
Tipper Tie
Whitewater delivers a solid DR strategy at $107,000 lower cost than tape
Tipper Tie, Inc., part of Dover Corp., manufactures of food processing and packaging machinery. It
would be hard to find a refrigerator case anywhere in the developed world that does not include foods
processed or packaged with Tipper Tie’s products.
Tipper Tie has a global workforce of 350 people. In addition to its headquarters in Apex, North Carolina,
the company has offices in Europe and is expanding into Brazil, China, and Kazakhstan.
Challenge: Inconsistent, time-consuming and expensive tape back up processes
Tipper Tie’s four production facilities are located in North Carolina, Switzerland, and Germany.
Historically, each site operated independently and this was true of backup practices. Although each site
used some form of tape backup, there was no consistency in terms of the hardware and software used
or the practices followed. “We had no centralized plan and no standardization, and this was always an
issue with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) audits,” says Drew Bartow, senior IT engineer at Tipper Tie.
Another problem, which Bartow could see clearly in the North Carolina facility, were the limitations
of tape backup in general. That facility had a seven-tape library with a single linear tape-open (LTO)
drive. At nearly five years old, the hardware needed to be upgraded. Tapes were picked up and stored
off-site by a tape vaulting service, which was another expense. Also, average time for a full backup was
72 hours. This was not a problem on a Friday, but when the end of month fell mid-week and someone
needed a file restored during the end-of-month backup, Bartow either had to stop the job or
delay the restore.
Bartow conducted exhaustive research for a better backup approach that could be standardized across
the production sites. In addition to written documentation and sales presentations from numerous
vendors, Bartow had the experience of the other Dover operating companies to guide him. A number
of those companies were using backup-todisk (B2D) solutions, so he test-drove some of
“I can’t say enough about the
those. “I saw a number of problems with that
technical support we have
approach,” Bartow explains. “First, they didn’t
dedupe data very well. Second, there were huge
received from Riverbed throughupfront costs. It would have cost us $200,000 to
out this process.”
deploy B2D across our four sites. That’s difficult
to justify, and didn’t include the maintenance
and licensing costs every year. Third, it would require complex installations and a steep learning curve,
and our two-person IT staff didn’t have time for that.”
Solution: Whitewater 510 and Amazon S3
One Dover company, Pump Solutions Group, recommended a different approach – storing data in the
cloud, using a Whitewater® cloud storage appliance from Riverbed Technology. “They basically said to
me, ‘Why wouldn’t you do this?’” says Bartow. “When I saw how pleased PSG was with Whitewater,
and how inexpensive cloud storage was, it made sense to give the Whitewater appliance a try.”
The simplicity of this solution compared to B2D was something Bartow noticed immediately. “It took
longer to find screws for the brackets to mount it in the server rack than to get the Whitewater
appliance up and running,” he says of the 15-minute installation process. “The appliance integrated
seamlessly into our Symantec Backup Exec software. We simply added it as a target, set parameters such
as how many concurrent jobs we wanted run, how to back up the files, and so on, and we were done.”
CASE STUDY: Tipper Tie
Bartow found the clear documentation provided by Riverbed® to be helpful. “Riverbed has very simple,
streamlined guides regarding set up, installation, and best practices,” he notes.
While the ease of installation was attractive, a few other factors also played into Bartow’s decision to
deploy Whitewater appliances across the organization. One is Riverbed’s flexible licensing structure.
“When we asked B2D vendors what we do when we need more space, they just said, ‘Add another
shelf.’ That would cost $35,000 per site,” he explains. “With Whitewater, we wouldn’t need a new
appliance. It will grow and scale with us as we just adjust the licensing.” Another factor in Riverbed’s
favor was its excellent support. “I can’t say enough about the technical support we have received from
Riverbed throughout this process,” Bartow says.
Tipper Tie deployed four Whitewater 510 appliances, one at each production facility. Each is connected
to a Backup Exec VM media server. For cloud storage, the company uses Amazon Simple Storage Service
(S3). In the North Carolina facility, 26.97 terabytes of backup data have been sent to Whitewater
appliance to date. Only 2.21 terabytes have gone to the Amazon cloud, representing a deduplication
rate for the appliance of 12.23x.
Benefits: Cost and time savings,
business continuity at no extra cost
“When I saw how pleased PSG
was with Whitewater, and how
inexpensive cloud storage
was, it made sense to give the
Whitewater appliance a try.”
If Tipper Tie had implemented a common tape
backup solution at the four production facilities,
Bartow estimates that it would have cost the
company $154,842 over three years. (That figure
includes a new server and new tape library at
each site, along with enough tapes for 30-day
rotation, maintenance, licenses, and support.) In contrast, the cost of the Whitewater solution over
three years will be $75,816 – a savings of nearly $80,000. That figure could be somewhat higher since
these calculations don’t include the elimination of the tape storage fee.
The Whitewater solution brings significant labor savings as well. Bartow has determined that basic tape
administration would require 1,170 hours over three years. Whitewater will require only 234 hours in
three years. The difference (936 hours) represents a savings for the company of $28,080.
These figures don’t include the time Bartow and his colleague save on an on-going basis when they
restore files. To illustrate, Bartow tells of a time when he needed to restore 20 gigabytes of files for
a legal matter. He got the request while at home, at night. Since this material had been stored after
the Whitewater deployment, Bartow was able to deliver that information in 15 minutes, working
from his Apple iPad. Later that night, he was asked for a similar amount of information that had been
backed up earlier to tape. He had to go into the office and track down the right tapes, mount them,
then perform the restores – a process that took seven hours. The most common scenario for a restore
involves a file that is still in the Whitewater cache, which is available almost instantly. “The one time we
had to pull something from the cloud, it took about 20 minutes,” Bartow says.
The Whitewater solution has given Tipper Tie an affordable and easily managed backup process that
meets SOX standards as well as Tipper Tie’s global IT mandate to “Simply, Standardize, and Reduce.”
Tipper Tie’s IT director, as well as Dover’s Corporate Compliance IT director, had no concerns about cloud
backup once he learned that the data is fully encrypted at rest within the cloud and during transmission
by the Whitewater appliance, and Amazon encrypts the data at rest and has SSAE-16, as well as FIPS
140-2 certification.
“It took longer to find screws for
the brackets than to get
the Whitewater appliance
up and running.”
With Whitewater, Tipper Tie now has a solid
disaster recovery (DR) strategy. But there is
another benefit of Whitewater that Bartow
says he was not expecting when he purchased
the appliances. With the purchase of a physical
appliance comes a virtual appliance license.
“You store that in Amazon, or at your remote
site or cold site and you’ve just written your business continuity plan without having to buy twin
appliances (one for the cold site and one for the hot site),” he explains. “How many tens or even
hundreds of thousands of dollars does that save? It’s really nice to be able to go to your manager and
say, ‘I’ve written a business continuity plan for us, and it didn’t cost anything.’”
Tipper Tie is now testing a Whitewater 3010 with Amazon’s lower-cost storage service, Glacier. Bartow
believes this could be a very good option for his company for data that is unlikely to be restored. “Hot
stuff, such as 30-day rotation data, we will keep in Amazon S3,” he explains. “But the information
that sits in storage permanently and probably won’t be called back will be sent to Glacier.” The savings
will be substantial. For example, it costs
Tipper Tie two hundred dollars now to store
“It’s really nice to be able to go to
end-of-month data in Amazon S3. It costs
your manager and say, ‘I’ve writ$11 to store that same data in Glacier. That
savings, multiplied by four sites, adds up to
ten a business continuity plan for
approximately $9,000 annually. The Whitewater
us, and it didn’t cost us anything.”
3010 appliance contributes to the savings by
deduplicating the data. During beta testing,
Tipper Tie is seeing a deduplication rate of 7.52x, meaning that of the 11 terabytes of data that has
been sent to the appliance, only 1.4 terabytes has been sent to Amazon Glacier.
SUMMARY
Although each of Tipper Tie’s four production sites previously used some form
of tape backup, there was no consistency in terms of the hardware and software
used or the practices followed. In addition to causing problems with SOX audits,
backing up to tape was proving to be costly and not fast enough to complete full
backups when they had to be done mid-month.
The company considered replacing the tape and standardizing on a backupto-disk system but found that option to be very expensive ($200,000) to deploy
across four sites. And when the company eventually needed more space, it would
cost another $35,000 per site. Also, B2D systems’ deduplication functionality
is limited, and the installation would have been more than the company’s twoperson IT team had time for.
Whitewater cloud storage appliances, in conjunction with Amazon S3 service,
offered a more affordable approach that has turned out to have numerous other
advantages as well. Tipper Tie installed a Whitewater appliance at all four
production sites, at a cost of only $75,816 over three years. (This represents a
savings of nearly $80,000 compared to upgrading and standardizing on a tape
system, which was another option the company considered.)
Managing the Whitewater appliances takes so much less time compared to tape
(936 fewer hours over three years) that the company is avoiding $28,080 in labor
costs over that timeframe. The appliances’ deduplication rate of more than 12x
holds down the cost of cloud storage. In one facility, 26.97 terabytes of backup
data have been sent to Whitewater appliance, while only 2.21 terabytes have gone
to the Amazon cloud. Restores now happen in 15 minutes versus an eight-hour
turnaround with tape. The Whitewater solution also gives Tipper Tie a consistent
backup process across its global operations and a solid DR strategy.
About Riverbed
Riverbed delivers performance for the
globally connected enterprise. With
Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and
intelligently implement strategic initiatives
such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud
computing, and disaster recovery without
fear of compromising performance. By giving
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understand, optimize and consolidate their
IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast,
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with the business needs of the organization.
Additional information about Riverbed
(NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at
www.riverbed.com.
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