Keeping an entire enterprise’s worth of information protected is no simple task, let alone if that company happens to employ a geographically distributed organizational structure and competes in an industry where the storage and management of data is heavily regulated. That’s the situation at McGladrey LLP, whose head of infrastructure, Tom Jackson, appeared on the latest episode of SiliconANGLE’s Cube Conversations series to share how the firm successfully overcame the operational challenges to modernizing its antiquated backup  environment.

Founded in 1924, McGladrey has grown to become one of the largest providers of assurance, tax and consulting services in the U.S. with over 7,000 employees spread across 75 cities. The company maintains a centralized facility that serves as its primary information hub, but much of its data is nonetheless kept locally at branches due to regulatory and other considerations.

“There’s a lot of work that happens locally in the offices and there’s applications that, in our industry, just need to be physically there with the people doing the work,” Jackson explained. As a result, backups historically had to be performed on-site, usually by managers or other lines-of-business staffers not versed in protecting sensitive files. That inevitably led to many offices neglecting to follow the daily copy schedule, leaving it to Jackson and his team to clean up the ensuing mess.

“We had many many times where we would go check logs, do a review of what’s happening and find offices where the backups were not being performed as frequently or as consistently as we would like,” he recalled. Something had to change.

Transitioning off tape  

Recognizing the need to enforce a more regular backup regime, McGladrey began scouring the market for disk-based solutions that could address that requirement while also eliminating the inherent flaws of its legacy tape environment. After looking at the options available at the time, circa 2009, the list was shorted to just candidates from which EMC Avamar eventually emerged victorious. There are a number of compelling reasons the firm chose the storage stalwart over the competition, Jackson details.

The main motivation behind the decision was the fact that Avamar employs variable-length deduplication, he said, a method of eliminating redundant information wherein files are broken down into irregularly-sized chunks rather than fixed segments like in other solutions. When executed on the client side, it produces an added reduction in the amount of data that has to be transmitted over the network as part of the backup operation, a benefit that runs complementary to McGladrey’s use case.

Another advantage EMC had over the rival bidders is a more flexible licensing model, Jackson continued. And equally important is the fact that Avamar comes with a turnkey appliance whereas the competing offerings the firm reviewed required cobbling together a platform from scratch.

Two years later,  McGladrey was again on the prowl, this time for a solution capable of reducing the floorspace requirements of its sprawling tape library. The company once again turned to EMC and bought a Data Domain backup system, which Jackson noted seamlessly plugged into its existing deployment.

Before and after

Before bringing EMC hardware into its data protection environment, McGladrey had 60 employees taking care of backups in branch offices, a task that Jackson says would consume about an hour of each worker’s time every day assuming nothing went wrong.  Today, it takes just one admin roughly four hours to go through the logs from the nightly runs of the entire organization.

Going forward, McGladrey will be working to implement the recently added integration between Avamar and Data Domain in its primary facility. The firm is also looking at ways to extend the benefits it has realized with the technology across other parts of its infrastructure, according to Jackson, but it will most likely hold off that plan for another few years until industry prices reach a more comfortable level.

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