Disaster recovery is more often associated with restless nights and emergency calls than deep slumbers and worry-free weekends, which is why information technology managers dream of finding a reliable, simple backup solution.

“As an IT manager, if the backups do their job properly, no one notices,” said Liam Furlong (pictured), IT manager at Revelation Software Concepts Pty. Ltd. “If this goes wrong, I break the business.”

Furlong spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation on how Dell Technologies Inc.’s integrative approach to data protection is helping him sleep better at night. (* Disclosure below.)

Higher compression rates means less storage and lower costs

Revelation Software’s mission is to deliver certainty in the rapidly changing IT landscape. With close to 150 virtual machines and 500 systems applications and products landscapes, the company operates a highly virtualized environment. Protecting it using a targeted appliance approach wasn’t working, according to Furlong.

“We had absolutely no cloud integration. Off-site copies were completely inadequate,” he said.

Adding to Furlong’s stress, only mission-critical systems could be backed up nightly, with a complete backup occurring just once a week. And when these backups ran long, they caused system slowdowns company-wide.

“Monday morning was a nerve-racking few hours while the weekend backup crawled through and finished,” Furlong said.

But that was then. Now, Revelation’s data is protected on-premises and in the cloud. Full backups occur each night, the rest of the company never complains about system slow-downs, and restore is simple and fast.

The difference comes thanks to a “one-stop” integrated solution from Dell EMC. “The PowerProtect device is our go-to,” Furlong said. “No matter what our problem is, I’ve just got one place to go.”

Previous data compression rates of three to six times have been increased to 150 to 200 times, according to Furlong. Expanding that out to an annual view, the rate increases to 300 times, meaning storage requirements have plummeted. “The cost per terabyte is down by hundreds of dollars,” he said.

Lower costs and more reliability means Furlong sleeps well at night, and IT is getting kudos from other departments across the company.

“It makes me look really good, and I haven’t had to do anything,” Furlong stated. “All I did was just go, ‘Yep, you guys do it. You guys deploy your solution.’”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this CUBE Conversation. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE