Advizex helps marquee retailer bring efficiency, performance, and cost savings to backup
When a distressed company is acquired, it almost always comes with a long, hard look at operations to determine what is working and what, sadly, does not. That’s what happened with this Advizex customer in the retail sector.
When the company’s various retail brands were acquired by a private equity firm, it naturally downsized where it made sense and adopted new technologies to improve performance — all with an eye on return on investment and reduced spending.
One area it found was operating inefficiently in the backend was backup and recovery. The company was using the Dell Data Protection Suite with backup being run on Dell Avamar. Over the years, it had experienced a degradation in the quality of backups, resulting in multiple support tickets being sent to the company’s technology partner: Advizex.
The final straw, however, that prompted an investigation into a new solution came with the annual support renewal.
“Based on the costs they were experiencing around maintenance and management, it prodded the business side to reach out to the IT leadership and say, ‘hey, you may want to take a look at alternate solutions because we’ve got to cut costs and improve performance, and that’s not happening here,’” says Patrick DeZellar, account manager at Advizex. “This prompted us to engage the OEM team from Rubrik.”
Advizex and Rubrik for the win
Advizex had already been working with the customer’s IT team, under various incarnations, for more than 18 years and had in that time earned a position as a trusted advisor. “We’ve been very hands-on. It’s not uncommon for us to spend one or two days a week at their data center just working with various business leaders,” DeZellar says.
After evaluating several solutions together, including Rubrik, Combell Cloud Backup, as well as some smaller players in web or cloud-only backup, the company moved ahead with Rubrik as it met their specific backup and recovery needs.
“Rubrik was selected based on how it met SLAs around business impact, outage levels, update frequency, and, of course, cost was a factor,” DeZellar says. He adds that another important factor was the number of locations that needed to be supported by the solution, including two primary data centers in the Midwest and Southeast, as well as a disaster recovery location between them.
“Rubrik aligns well with the complexity of having those multiple locations,” he says. “So, for our proof of concept (POC), we specifically tested it across multiple locations — with a demo unit in one of their primary data centers and another at a distribution center in Indiana.”
“We conducted extensive testing and everything went off flawlessly.”
In addition to Advizex’ own expertise, DeZellar praises the extremely white gloves approach of the Rubrik technical team for the project’s exceptional success.
Getting everything just right
Essential to the new backup and recovery solution was right sizing it for the environment and customer’s needs. The Advizex team and customer IT conducted a thorough process of determining the data stored and shared across the customer’s various environments, categorizing, and prioritizing it.
Based on the criteria set out, the team ensured the solution met correct SLAs for each tier of data based on customer classifications. After all the advance work and POC, implementation was completed within a day.
The customer now experiences many unique benefits of Rubrik including air-gapped, immutable, access-controlled backup, which isolates data from malicious attacks and prevents backup files from being modified, deleted, or encrypted.
It has given the company rapid restore capabilities, allowing it to meet the strict recovery time objective (RTO) necessary for retail where downtime would result in tremendous loss of revenue. The efforts to modernize the company’s backup system has been “eye-opening” and has aided in developing evolving disaster recovery plans.
Perhaps most importantly, performance has improved, DeZellar notes. It’s a win for everyone, he suggests. The customer is now prepared to meet its backup needs today and for years to come; meanwhile, the Advizex team has a happy customer once again, helping in its mission of creating customers for life.
“We no longer receive angry calls about their backup.”