4-page Case Study - Posted 3/27/2008
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AutoNation Achieves Backups 12 Times Faster, Cuts Costs with New Backup Software
Leading automotive retailer AutoNation watched its data expand as rapidly as its car sales. When its data stores hit 15 terabytes, the company could no longer back up all of its data in a 24-hour period. Also, the tape-based backup scheme required hours of management each week and was often unreliable. AutoNation decided to deploy Microsoft® System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, a disk-and-tape backup system, to back up its Microsoft-based file, database, and messaging workloads. Since moving to the new software, AutoNation has seen a 12-times reduction in backup times and a six-hour timesaving each week for IT staff. Users are more productive because of the ready availability of disk-based backups, and backup maintenance costs have dropped by 30 percent. AutoNation is also using the new software to implement a cost-effective disaster recovery plan.
Situation
AutoNation is the largest automotive retailer in the United States, with over U.S.$19 billion in annual revenue from the sale of new and used vehicles, parts and service, and financial services and insurance. In March 2007, AutoNation sold its six millionth vehicle, the only auto retailer to achieve this milestone. Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, AutoNation employs approximately 25,000 people at 257 dealership locations across 16 states.
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“The fact that Data Protection Manager has a built-in disaster recovery capability makes it an unbelievable value. Its closest competitor costs three times as much without this feature.” |
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Ed Olson
Lead Windows Infrastructure Engineer, AutoNation |
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Through the years, the company’s data has grown exponentially. Dealership acquisitions and increased sales have meant more employees, e-mail messages, car data, sales data, customer data, and regulatory compliance data. About five years ago, the company centralized its infrastructure and removed server computers from its dealerships. It moved file, database, domain controller, messaging, and application servers to the Fort Lauderdale data center to simplify server management and lower costs. Users across the country access all applications using Citrix remote-access software.
Even though data backup was centralized and thus easier to manage than remote backups, the company’s data volumes grew to the point where its tape-based backup technology couldn’t keep up. Ed Olson, Lead Windows Infrastructure Engineer in the company’s Fort Lauderdale IT staff, oversees backup operations and explains the challenges. “We were trying to shoehorn 12 to 15 terabytes of data onto 15 tape drives each night, and it just wasn’t working,” he says. A staff of eight people spent hours each week tightly scheduling backup jobs using Microsoft® Office Excel® spreadsheet software. “Every time we added a new job or application, we had to rearrange the schedule,” Olson says. “If a job failed, we had to restart it and sometimes switch to a different drive or move to a different time slot, which messed up the whole schedule. It was a nightmare, and in the process we lost a lot of backup jobs.”
The IT staff spent about six hours a week scheduling and rescheduling backups, which took them away from more important tasks such as supporting business applications and users. The tape media also failed from time to time; tapes ran out in the middle of a backup; and an offsite tape storage service was expensive—about $30,000 a year.
Restoring accidentally deleted files was another time-consuming problem for both IT staff and users. Once or twice each week, someone lost a file and needed help to recover it. The IT staff had to call Iron Mountain, its offsite tape storage vendor, and have the appropriate tape retrieved. Each retrieval was expensive, both in terms of cost ($200 per instance) and lost IT staff and user productivity (about three hours per instance).
By mid-2006, the company’s data had grown so large that Olson’s staff could no longer capture a full data backup in a 24-hour period. It was time to make a change.
Solution
Finding a faster backup solution was Olson’s top priority—but cost was another important consideration. Automobile sales were down in late 2006, and the company was cutting costs. Olson learned of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 from his local Microsoft representative and was immediately interested. System Center Data Protection Manager is a disk-and-tape–based backup solution designed specifically for Windows®-based environments. It continuously safeguards changed files at the block level by copying them to a secondary disk and later to tape.
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I can offload three terabytes of data to tape in six to seven hours … System Center Data Protection Manager gave us a 12-times speedup. |
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Ed Olson
Lead Windows Infrastructure Engineer, AutoNation |
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“We really liked the looks of Data Protection Manager for three key reasons,” Olson says. “Its disk-to-disk-to-tape design, the fact that we could eliminate full backups altogether and simply take snapshots, and its disaster recovery features. We also liked the fact that it was designed for Microsoft-based workloads and would give us more reliable backup for our Microsoft applications. It was also far less costly than another solution we evaluated.”
AutoNation tested System Center Data Protection Manager for several weeks and quickly resolved the few problems that arose with assistance received in the online discussion group on the Microsoft Web site. Olson’s team then began to create full backups of 6 terabytes of data on its 11 file server computers, taking incremental backups every four hours. “An incremental backup takes just a few minutes,” Olson says. “With continuous data protection, we’re never out of sync more than four hours at a time.”
Next, AutoNation moved its Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 messaging data and Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database workloads to System Center Data Protection Manager. “Backing up SQL Server databases with Data Protection Manager is very easy; we have continuous protection up to the last transaction,” Olson says. AutoNation has a small implementation of Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and plans to back up that data to System Center Data Protection Manager, too.
The company runs System Center Data Protection Manager on three Dell PowerEdge 2950 server computers running the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition operating system. Each server is attached to multiple Dell PowerVault MD1000 external disk drives that each contains fifteen 750-gigabyte (GB) drives. AutoNation has 90 terabytes of raw data loaded onto the disk array. The PowerVault drives are connected to a Dell ML6030 tape silo for secondary backup to tape.
Using System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, AutoNation is safeguarding the following workloads and data volumes:
- Files—11 servers containing 6 terabytes of data
- SQL Server 2005—One 1.2-terabyte national dealership database and several smaller databases averaging 300 GB
- Exchange Server 2003—7 servers, each with 250 GB of data
Benefits
By moving its data backups to Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, AutoNation has achieved backups 12-times faster and reduced weekly backup management chores to less than an hour. User productivity has increased, since the IT staff has quicker access to disk-based backups and can restore lost files faster. AutoNation is also saving money from its new backup scheme, with annual reductions expected in tape silo maintenance and elimination of third-party offsite tape storage costs.
Backups 12 Times Faster
With System Center Data Protection Manager, AutoNation achieved its number-one objective—to increase backup speeds. “I can offload three terabytes of data to tape in six to seven hours,” Olson says. “Previously, we needed 24 hours just to back up one terabyte. System Center Data Protection Manager gave us a 12-times speedup.” When AutoNation backs up an application for the first time, it takes a full backup. However, each backup thereafter takes a snapshot of changed data, which only takes a few minutes.
“Our data is growing at a rate of about 25 percent a year. The huge backup acceleration we’ve received with System Center Data Protection Manager will help us keep up with rising data volumes,” Olson says.
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We were trying to shoehorn 12 to 15 terabytes of data onto 15 tape drives each night, and it just wasn’t working. |
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Ed Olson
Lead Windows Infrastructure Engineer, AutoNation |
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Improved IT Staff Productivity
Using the simple, automated disk-to-tape design of System Center Data Protection Manager and the program’s graphical user interface, the AutoNation operations staff no longer has to spend hours each week rearranging the backup schedule and fiddling with tapes. They just pull the filled tapes off the drive and ship them to Iron Mountain. “Even if we run out of tapes on the silo, it doesn’t stop the backup,” Olson says. “As long as we have the disk space, we capture the backup.”
Olson says the timesavings are significant for a busy staff under budget constraints. “The System Center Data Protection Manager interface is very easy to use; we can teach someone how to use the program in 15 minutes. We’ve been able to reduce six hours a week of backup-related chores to less than an hour a week,” he says. “Our staff can spend more time monitoring network outages at dealerships and working on business-critical systems such as our dealership management system.”
Increased User Productivity
With the disk-based backups provided by System Center Data Protection Manager, AutoNation now has backups onsite instead of having to recall tapes from Iron Mountain. “We’re now constantly backing up data through a synchronization process, which delivers greater peace of mind,” Olson says. “Our data is vital to our business, and we have fewer worries that something will get lost or take several hours to recover.”
When a user accidentally deletes a file, the helpdesk can restore it immediately from System Center Data Protection Manager drives. “Before, we needed two hours to get a tape from Iron Mountain and another hour to load it into the silo and locate the file,” Olson says. “Now, the restore process begins immediately and shrinks to ten minutes. That happens once or twice a day, so it’s a big timesaving.”
AutoNation uses System Center Data Protection Manager in conjunction with the Volume Shadow Copy Service feature that is incorporated into many Microsoft desktop and server operating systems. The Volume Shadow Copy Service takes point-in-time snapshots of data, known as shadow copies, and retains them on the user’s computer. However, instead of storing shadow copies on servers, AutoNation uses System Center Data Protection Manager to store them on disk. The complementary nature of the two programs further simplifies backup chores.
Lower Costs
Saving money was not an original impetus for moving to a new backup scheme, because the company had to make a change to accommodate rising data volumes. However, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 cost one-third of what competitive products cost, and annual backup-related maintenance chores are today one-third of what they were.
AutoNation also expects to save $30,000 annually in offsite tape-storage fees once it sets up System Center Data Protection Manager to copy files to the company’s disaster-recovery site in Chicago. “The fact that Data Protection Manager has a built-in disaster recovery capability makes it an unbelievable value, considering that its closest competitor costs three times as much without this feature,” Olson says.
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
Microsoft System Center
Microsoft System Center is a family of leading IT management solutions that helps you proactively plan, deploy, manage, and optimize your IT environment. System Center solutions capture and aggregate knowledge about your infrastructure, policies, processes, and best practices so your IT staff can build manageable systems and automate operations in order to reduce costs, improve application availability, and enhance service delivery.
For more information about the System Center family of solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/systemcenter
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about AutoNation products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.autonation.com
