Technology can be a key business differentiator for any
organization and sooner they realize, the better it is. Starting
operations in 2009, Gurgaon based Orbis Financial Corporation was
quick to understand the benefits that IT can bring to its business.
Orbis operates in the financial market as a SEBI registered
custodian, offering a range of forward looking services to equip
the investor to efficiently manage his investing operations
securely. The company invested over Rs 5 crore in building its high
tech IT infrastructure consisting of a Tier 3 data center and a
suite of enterprise software applications.
"The solution has helped us reduce backup failures. It has
also helped us remove data that has aged past immediate-term
retention requirements"
- Ramkumar Mohan, Senior Manager-IT, Orbis
With an advanced IT infrastructure, the company also required a
robust data backup and archival system that was highly scalable to
meet its future demands. As Indian regulators stipulate all
financial institutions to have a backup of their data, it made
backup an extremely critical process for Orbis.
Since Orbis, as an organization was in a growth stage, its data
requirements were escalating at a rapid pace. “We use
close to ten applications; which includes ERP, business
intelligence, and other back office applications, including a
document management application. But we needed a solution for
backup that was capable of file level backups of virtual machines
and was easy to use,” says Ramkumar Mohan, Senior Manager-IT,
Orbis.
The firm currently uses 60 virtual servers that generate about
one terabyte of data for backup every month. To automate its backup
needs, Orbis decided to use a storage solution from CommVault. The
firm created a schedule within the backup application that allowed
it to take incremental backups even during transactions. With
features such as native deduplication, data protection, search and
resource management capabilities, ease of policy formation and
automation of restore and backup functions, Orbis could now achieve
faster backups with lesser manual intervention.
Orbis has a two-tier storage architecture with disk and tape
used for storage and archival. “CommVault has helped us to
increase ROI from expensive disk storage, by sharing access to disk
with static and dynamic configurations. It has also helped us save
disk space and by reducing backup failures and by removing data
that has aged past immediate-term retention requirements,”
explains Mohan. CommVault's support and integration with
VMware was also very helpful for Orbis since the company’s
data center was entirely virtualized on VMware Infrastructure.
Next step forward
After reaping significant benefits from the solution, Orbis has
already started using its IT infrastructure as a USP to sell its
services to its clients. “Most clients want to ensure that we
are using the best of technology to make sure that we maintain an
optimum uptime. With a robust storage backup system in place, we
can now offer them this assurance,” says Mohan.
Orbis is now taking a step forward and evaluating the latest
buzzword in storage—data deduplication. The deduplication
feature provides a unified approach for any storage tier -- both on
disk and tape. This allows scalability and better performance for
the entire data management infrastructure. Data reduction begins at
the client level, and extends to include tape copies that can be
stored off-site. The unified approach has helped the firm speed up
network traffic, reduce backup window size, accelerate recovery,
and optimize the overall disc infrastructure to support default
SLAs.