BUYER CASE STUDY. Psomas Uses Riverbed Whitewater to Back Up to the Amazon S3 Cloud IDC OPINION IN THIS BUYER CASE STUDY

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1 BUYER CASE STUDY Psomas Uses Riverbed Whitewater to Back Up to the Amazon S3 Cloud Laura DuBois Amita Potnis IDC OPINION Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F Increasingly, knowledge-based organizations such as consulting, engineering, architecture, and professional services firms are relying on information technology as a means to run their business operations, service existing clients, and meet the needs of growing business demands. As a result, firms in the engineering education sector are placing a higher priority on critical IT services such as business continuity, operational backup/recovery, and disaster recovery (DR). IDC finds: With the advent and increasing adoption of cloud-based services and the benefits these services can offer, it is natural for firms to consider cloud approaches to robust disaster recovery as well as other IT services. Over the past several years, cloud storage gateways have become available. Packaged in a number of different ways including as software, as virtual appliances, and as physical appliances, these gateways address the fundamental ability to bridge on-premises and cloud storage environments. These gateways serve different use cases, including business continuity and backup and recovery. As firms consider cloud storage for any persistent and long-term workload, they must compare the recurring costs of a cloud-based subscription service approach with continuity and recovery, where pricing is based on inbound and outbound data transfer, with the capex and opex costs of an on-premise approach to enable business and data recovery. IN THIS BUYER CASE STUDY This IDC Buyer Case Study highlights the challenges Psomas, a leading engineering firm serving clients in the water/wastewater, transportation, and public, private, and institutional site development sectors faced with its legacy disaster recovery and backup strategy. It looks at the options the firm considered, the key evaluation criteria during solution consideration, and the results after implementation of the Riverbed Whitewater cloud storage gateway. IDC spoke with Chris Pinckney, the chief information officer at Psomas, to gain a firsthand understanding of the firm's IT environment, key business and IT objectives, and the role that the firm considered cloud-based IT services might play in addressing those objectives. Filing Information: December 2011, IDC #232121, Volume: 1 Storage Solutions: Disk-Based Data Protection, Continuity and Recovery: Buyer Case Study

2 SITUATION OVERVIEW Organization Overview Psomas, founded in 1946, is a full-service consulting firm providing engineering services in planning, surveying, engineering design, program/construction management, and environmental consulting. Psomas is ranked by Engineering News- Record (ENR) magazine as one of the top design firms in the nation. With dozens of LEED Accredited Professionals, Psomas serves public and private sector clients in the transportation, water, site development, federal, and energy markets. Psomas has offices in California, Arizona, and Utah. Information Technology Overview Psomas has a technology environment distributed across 10 offices in the western parts of the United States. Each of the 11 offices services as a center where civil engineering work is done locally. As a result, each of these offices has server and file storage for large AutoCAD and Bentley MicroStation CAD files, which are created and stored local to each office. Large file sharing between distributed sites is enabled by the use of Riverbed Steelhead appliances, which dramatically improve WAN performance. Within each major office, there is virtual desktop and Windows file server infrastructure with local storage. The Psomas datacenter infrastructure resides in a co-location facility where the company's Windows- and Linux-based enterprise database such as accounting and human resources applications as well as Internet and extranet servers reside. Psomas leverages VMware to virtualize as many workloads as possible and plans to be 100% virtualized by the end of The company currently relies on NetApp storage in its core datacenter for its enterprise applications and Web servers. For messaging, Psomas moved to Microsoft BPOS (Shared) in Psomas also recently tested a VMware ESX and SRM 5.0 extended between its co-location datacenter and a cloud datacenter. This testing was to evaluate the future use of this solution for business continuity/disaster recovery in the cloud. In addition to using cloud services for messaging, Psomas was also a user of Amazon S3 for storing over 500,000 static documents including accounts payable/old invoice files. Psomas set up processes to route invoices older than two years to Amazon S3. Challenges and Solution The challenges Psomas was facing stemmed from capital expenditures and manual administration of legacy tape infrastructure in support of large CAD/CAM file backup processes. According to Pinckney, "Psomas was spending a ton of money on tapes, when we wanted to get rid of the tapes. Our tape infrastructure was dying, and we did not want to put in capex on an old backup paradigm. Just dealing with the idiosyncrasies of spooling and swapping tapes was annoying. It meant IT personnel had to drive out to the office to deal with tape management issues." The Psomas IT department evaluated several options that allowed them to continue to use the current Backup Exec software. The first approach considered was to 2 # IDC

3 deploy an on-premise Data Domain system as a target-side deduplication device. This did not address Psomas' desire to minimize capital investment in backup. From a cloud perspective, Psomas investigated the Iron Mountain VFS solution, which was eliminated as an option because of product maturity. Last, the Symantec solution required a change to its existing Backup Exec environment. Already an extensive user of Amazon cloud services, Psomas was looking to divest itself of capital costs associated with backup and leverage cloud services if possible. Data Domain was strictly an on-premise capital investment, and according to Pinckney, "We did not want to face an inflexible situation where we sized an appliance, bought it, and hope we got it right while avoiding contraction in our data, which might result in shelfware for storage capacity." The cloud storage services from Iron Mountain and Symantec required Psomas to replace its investment in Backup Exec. Already a very happy Riverbed Steelhead customer, Psomas was introduced to the Riverbed Whitewater solution and started testing it in Results After six months of extensive testing, Psomas went live with 11 Whitewater appliances in production in March The Whitewater appliance resident in each office was configured in hours and serves as a gateway between the office Backup Exec server and Amazon S3 cloud storage. Setup for the Whitewater appliances was a matter of bringing up the server and applying network settings. The Whitewater appliance presents as a CIFS share to the network and the Backup Exec server. According to Pinckney, "The only minor complication is if you want to run concurrent backups, which most firms would for performance gains, then you have to create multiple target volumes, one for each backup." Once set up, each Whitewater gateway deduplicates, compresses, and encrypts Backup Exec backup data streams before storing them locally in disk cache and copying the data over the network to Amazon datacenters. Each office has a different data profile, and as a result, 10 offices are running Whitewater virtual appliances and 1 office is running a physical appliance. Standard backup policies of weekly full and nightly incremental are run for all the offices. The largest office, Orange County, runs the physical Whitewater system and has a 2.4TB weekly full backup, with smaller daily backups. Monthly full backups are retained for 10 years for long-term retention. Pinckney estimates that across all 11 offices, there is approximately 8.5TB of weekly full backup data. Interestingly, the amount of distributed data exceeds the smaller 1.5TB of data Psomas has in its co-location datacenter. All Backup Exec backups in both the datacenter and the remote offices leverage Whitewater and Amazon S3 cloud storage. According to Pinckney, Psomas' use of Riverbed Whitewater appliances provided the following benefits: Cost savings from tape elimination. According to Pinckney, "Tapes were more expensive than our Whitewater appliances." Psomas realized a 60% savings in total infrastructure cost including tape media, tape technology refreshes, and 2011 IDC #

4 tape collection services when the company moved to the Whitewater gateway approach. This excludes cloud storage fees. Faster restore times. Restore times have gone from hours to minutes. Now, Psomas says restores are very fast as most of the data pushed to cloud still exists in the Whitewater cache thus restores can be done locally. The previous restoration process required finding and loading tapes and in some cases included collecting them from offsite facilities. Data reduction cost savings. Psomas is seeing an average deduplication ratio of 25:1, with a maximum of 30:1 and a minimum of 17:1. This results in saving the company network transmission costs and storage costs in the Amazon S3 cloud. Additionally, the appliance reduces the time to back up data to the cloud storage provider. Improved disaster recovery. With Whitewater, Psomas can initiate a restore from one location to another from and between offices. In the event of a site problem in one office, Psomas can create a read-only virtual instance of Whitewater and start running restore from Backup Exec. Before Whitewater, DR would require tape recall from an offsite tape storage provider, waiting a day to run a restore and guarantee the tape media is the right one. Control long-term retention. According to Pinckney, "There are fewer things controlling our retention policies. We do not have to pull tapes for destruction." All retention and expiration management can be done logically versus physically with tape media. Longer term, Psomas would like to separate out backup from long-term archive. Backup time improvements. Prior to implementing Whitewater appliances, Psomas ran verify processes to ensure good backups were written to tape media. Through the process of eliminating tape, the backup times improved as a result of eliminating the SCSI verify process. Instead, the verify process occurs during the CIFS-based Whitewater backup. This change in the verify process in concert with virtualizing the Backup Exec servers resulted in backup performance gains. Fits into branch office in-a-box (BOB) strategy. Because of the deployment and licensing flexibility of Whitewater, each Whitewater virtual edition can be included in Psomas' standardized BOB servers. Each BOB server is an ESX server that assumes all network monitoring, Active Directory, and print and backup services. Now included in this standard configuration is Whitewater virtual appliance. The BOB strategy reduces server footprint by 80%. Standard BOB servers are managed remotely via the VMware vcenter client. FUTURE OUTLOOK Psomas is pleased with the results of the Whitewater implementation and has been able to realize a 60% capex savings. As the company continues to evaluate centralizing more of its data into larger offices or the datacenter as well as extend VDI deployments, this could have implications on future Whitewater configurations. 4 # IDC

5 Because of the flexibility of Whitewater, Psomas could either reapply existing licenses or procure new ones. In the coming years, the Whitewater strategy will closely follow Psomas' data management approach. As Psomas is already storing fixed content in Amazon S3 today, the company may consider extending that in the future. Future use cases for Amazon might be for cloud-based CAD computing. In the event an office went down, being up to stand up a CAD application in Amazon to enable business continuity would be attractive. In this scenario, it would be beneficial if Whitewater could be used to back up Psomas' data in Amazon S3 to another region in S3. Psomas has a few shorter-term enhancements it would like to see made to the Whitewater solution. More reporting detail on how Whitewater can help with data management and a centralized management console for managing multiple Whitewaters from a single interface would be useful for IT management. Besides the above short-term enhancements wish list, end users should be cognizant of the following when deploying Whitewater gateways: While the Whitewater appliance reduces data and backup time, it currently only has NAS connectivity. Riverbed has no immediate plans to integrate iscsi connectivity. Supporting iscsi will allow an additional way to connect to the backup host, allowing firms that prefer to use block to consider Riverbed Whitewater gateway. Ease of use and management are important to any backup solution. The fact that Riverbed's Whitewater does not support Active Directory currently is not a showstopper. However, with increasing users and data, it may become a very important tool to maintain transparency and control over user rights. ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE For firms considering a cloud backup strategy, there are a few important factors to consider: First, depending on the size of the initial backup, network bandwidth upgrades or other network optimization functions may need to be applied. The time it takes to get a full backup to the cloud is, in part, function of the network capacity. Some firms consider sneakernet approaches by sending a drive or a DVD to a cloud provider to seed the initial data set. In the case of Psomas, the company had already upgraded its network to accommodate the migration to Microsoft BPOS. Deduplication and compression can help to address the first backup problem. However, conversely, firms need to be cognizant of not overloading a network with backup traffic. Selecting tools that can be tuned to send data at specific times and to throttle the activity if needed is important. The second factor to consider is the cost of cloud storage, which is still not cheap for long-term workloads. To drive greater persistent adoption of S3, Amazon has reduced S3's pricing a number of times. Most recently, Amazon eliminated inbound data transfer fees. According to Pinckney, "The costs for Amazon S IDC #

6 quickly added up and were more than Psomas initially expected." As a result, firms would be well served to plan for capacity costs with the cloud storage component of a gateway solution. LEARN MORE Related Research Cloud Storage Gateways: Bridging On-Premises and Cloud Storage Environments (IDC #229499, July 2011) U.S. Public IT Cloud Services by Industry Sector: More Details on the Opportunity (IDC #226222, December 2010) Cloud Storage Impacted by Datacenter Transformations and the Changing Role of IT (IDC #226214, December 2010) Public Cloud Business Continuity Services Remain an Underserved Opportunity (IDC #224792, September 2010) Adoption and Spending Intentions on Public Cloud Backup Services (IDC #224265, August 2010) Storage in the Cloud: Overview of Key Players and Service Offerings (IDC #224244, July 2010) Worldwide Storage in the Cloud Forecast: Growth in Public Cloud Storage Services Continues as Firms Decapitalize IT (IDC #223396, June 2010) IDC's Worldwide Storage and the Cloud Taxonomy, 2009: Assessing the Opportunity from All Angles (IDC #221293, December 2009) Copyright Notice This IDC research document was published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service, providing written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences. Visit to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit Please contact the IDC Hotline at , ext (or ) or sales@idc.com for information on applying the price of this document toward the purchase of an IDC service or for information on additional copies or Web rights. Copyright 2011 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved. 6 # IDC