Lumenate Techologies CEO Jamie Shepard On Wikibon Cube Conversations

In the marketing world, the “four Ps” stand for price, product, promotion, and place. Lumenate Technologies LP has adapted the age-old formula for an entirely different item on the corporate agenda: data protection.

Jamie Shepard, who heads backup and recovery operations for the Texas firm, returned to theCUBE for the second time in as many months to share how a new focus on policy, processes, people and product has enabled his team to embrace a modern approach to guard against contingencies.

Headquartered in Dallas with operations throughout the country, Lumenate helps organizations sort out the implementation details of their on-premise IT projects and offers managed services that serve as an extension of its core consultancy portfolio. The company also stands out as a close partner of EMC Corp., which, in a demonstration of that relationship, supplied all the equipment Shepard said he needed to modernize his data protection environment.

Before

Prior to the upgrade, the executive said he and his team had all the problems of a typical IT organization struggling to make do with legacy infrastructure and limited resources. Topping his list of concerns was the prospect of “systems going down and not having that backup that I needed,” Shepard told host Dave Vellante. “In my business, if I lose an email [from a prospect], I’ve lost a deal,” he explained.

Picking up where he left off in his previous appearance on theCUBE just a few weeks earlier, the executive went on to lay out the technical aspect of the business challenge, detailing Lumenate’s previous data protection environment that consisted of two aging Centera archives. The appliances did what was expected of them, but the firm discovered that it was rapidly running out of space and power capacity in its production data center to accommodate the sprawling deployment.

The makeover

Shepard needed to find a denser alternative, and fast. To make it worse, he not only had the physical limitations of the facility to worry about but also the myriad regulatory requirements that his firm is subject to. In addition to its own data, Lumenate also stores information for customers in privacy-conscious industries such as healthcare, which adds up to a lot of laws that each have to be carefully taken into account before any major change.

After reviewing its options, the company decided to replace its two Centera machines with a pair of EMC’s disk-based DataDomain boxes, which provide a write-once-read-many architecture that is particularly well-suited for the safekeeping of data. Lumenate took the opportunity to modernize the rest of its data protection environment and standardized on the storage stalwart’s NetWorker unified backup and recovery suite, enabling the File-Level Retention feature in its existing VNX arrays with the same stroke.

Not wanting to go half way, the firm also updated its email server to Exchange 2010 and virtualized the underlying infrastructure. “We were an older Exchange shop, so we were the typical ‘it’s time to do it all together’ shop. And we did it all, and we did it in the span of about eight months,” Shepard said. That left the firm in an incomparably better position.

After

Shepard estimated that the upgrade has helped Lumenate save in the neighborhood of $195,000 on operations. “Product-wise, we saved on maintenance, we saved on cooling costs, we went to a smaller data center. So all the typical stuff you read out there – it’s as advertised,” he told Vellante.

The executive added that the new environment averages a deduplication rate of 10:1, which means that ten times more data can fit into the DataDomain appliances than would be possible otherwise. What’s more, he said that the deployment acts as a multi-tenant service, enabling each department to have its own isolated space for storing files. Shepard credited that success to Lumenate’s “four Ps” approach, which he advised his peers to apply in their own modernization efforts for optimal results.

Watch the full interview (11:26)