IN BRIEF
Industry
Challenges
- Improve data protection by ensuring the shortest possible backup windows over the WAN
- Reduce IT effort spent on monitoring and managing routine backup tasks
- Accelerate all other key applications running over the WAN
Solution
- A Steelhead appliance was deployed in each of 4 offices
Benefits
- Backup windows reduced from 24 to 6 hours
- Greater data security in the event of loss
- IT Staff spends more time focused on forward-looking projects, and not on manual monitoring tasks
- Additional productivity benefits seen across the organization
Mercury Interactive
Riverbed Steelhead Appliances Reduce Backup Windows by 75%
Mercury Interactive (www.mercury.com), the global leader in business technology optimization (BTO), is one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. Nearly 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies and dozens of government agencies globally rely on Mercury to fulfill their BTO strategies.
Mercury’s BTO offerings for application delivery, application management, and IT governance help customers maximize the business value of IT by optimizing application quality, performance, and availability as well as managing IT costs, risks, and compliance.
Founded in 1989, Mercury conducts business in more than 35 countries and has been a publicly traded company for more than 10 years. The company employs more than 2,700 people in 60 offices across the world. Mercury is a NASDAQ 100 company, and is part of the Standard & Poors 500. In recognition of the company’s outstanding track record, Forbes Magazine named Mercury CEO, Amnon Landan Entrepreneur of the Year for 2003.
Challenge: Ensuring a Timely Data Protection Process for Global Software Development
Mercury Interactive builds its BTO products by employing only the smartest, most capable development, Q&A, and support staff from around the world. “The challenge for the Mercury IT team,” notes Director of IT Pete Kinkead, “is to develop an infrastructure that can effectively support our development process around the world.”
Mercury has four key development locations around the world. Kirkland, Washington, Boulder, Colorado, and Yehud, Israel are all connected to the Sunnyvale, California headquarters via an MPLS network. Throughput ranges anywhere from 3 to 5 megabits per second on each WAN connection, and latency ranges from 50 to 200 milliseconds.
Pete continued, “Along with the general challenge of a constantly growing amount of data going across our WAN, a key challenge for us has always been how to effectively back up data from our global operations in a fast, reliable and secure manner. We were already performing network-based backup for our Network Appliance Filers via NetApp SnapMirror. That gives us reliable backups to our central data center. But making backup faster is another story.”
“Given our long distance WAN connections and the latency on those connections, throughput has always slowed down application performance. It was common for us to see throughput of approximately .5 Gigabytes of data per hour, or about 10 Gigabytes per day when backing up data. Even with SnapMirror’s differencing algorithms, our backups could take up to 24 hours. If backups ever exceed 24 hours, we’re in danger of not having up-to-date data in the event of a mishap.”
Solution: Steelhead Appliances Shorten Backup Windows
Kinkead, along with his team, deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances in each office in order to accelerate the performance of all applications across the wide area network. “The power of the Steelhead appliance from Riverbed is that it could solve the performance problem for all of our critical applications running across the WAN. Backup and replication was one of our top priority applications.”
Pete noted, “The Riverbed Steelhead appliances have dramatically shortened our backup windows. Backup of remote Filers now takes roughly 6 to 8 hours, instead of 24 hours. In addition, instead of checking in on the backup process 4 to 5 times a day, our team can start the process at night and be sure it will be finished the next morning. We don’t have to spend as much time monitoring the process, which means IT can stay focused on other projects.”
Because of the Steelhead appliance’s transparent deployment, accelerating SnapMirror takes no extra configuration or integration. Pete recalled, “We were quite surprised when one day our backup process took 25% of its usual time, because we were busy analyzing the effects of Riverbed Steelhead appliances on our FTP transfers. We made no changes to our software – the Steelhead appliances just started working right away.”
Benefits: Timely Data Protection and Accelerated Applications
For Mercury, data protection is an incredibly important process to protect the company’s intellectual property. “Our engineers do more than 50 code builds per day,” notes Kinkead. “If we don’t have a timely data protection process that can complete backups quickly, we are at risk. If there is a data loss and our backups do not represent the most recent data, the development and QA teams will have lost hundreds of hours of work.”
Additionally, because of the protocol-independent nature of the Steelhead appliance architecture, Mercury accelerates all TCP applications that run over the corporate network. “It’s another story all together to discuss how Riverbed Steelhead appliances have accelerated our development cycle. By accelerating FTP transmissions among our locations, we have been able to cut our development cycle down from 4 days to 1.5 days,” said Kinkead.
“The power of Riverbed’s approach is that they can accelerate all applications running over TCP. The Steelhead appliance was simple to deploy, and without any special configurations, provided a productivity boost to all of our important applications. The Steelhead appliances have paid for themselves many times over.”
In addition Kinkead noted, “We have seen dramatic bandwidth reduction due to the Riverbed Steelhead appliances. Our bandwidth utilization has been reduced by 90% across the board. That means, in addition to providing greater bandwidth availability today, we can defer bandwidth upgrades well into the future.”
Mercury Interactive wanted to ensure that backup and replication for the software development team was providing the high level of data protection the company needed.
With an ever-growing set of data to be backed up, the company found that back- ing up its Network Appliance Filers via SnapMirror could take up to 24 hours.
By deploying Steelhead appliances, Mercury reduced its backup windows to roughly 6 hours.
By accelerating the performance of the SnapMirror application, Mercury can now ensure that it always has the freshest possible backup of its
global software development operations. In addition, IT spends less time moni-toring and managing the backup process.
“The power of the Steelhead appliance is that it solves the performance problem for all of our critical applications running across the WAN.”
“Backup and replication was one of our top priority applications. Backup of remote filers now takes roughly 6 to 8 hours, instead of 24 hours.”
“By accelerating FTP transmissions among our locations, we have been able to cut our development cycle down from 4 days to 1.5 days.”
“Our bandwidth utilization has been reduced by 90% across the board. We can defer bandwidth upgrades well into the future.”
