INDUSTRY WATCH

In addition to selling and servicing cars , the business includes accident repair , parts centres , car and van rentals and fleet services . It has 9,000 staff and an annual turnover of £ 3 billion .

Challenge

As a distributed and diversified business , Arnold Clark has complex data management requirements . Its branches and business lines require immediate access to information , state-of-the-art record keeping and excellent backup and Disaster Recovery . Service interruptions can have catastrophic effects , resulting in immediate loss of revenue and reputational damage . efficiency was resulting in high cost , while storage limitations made it impossible to create data archives .

In addition , critical SQL workloads were not adequately being backed up and archiving tapes offsite was both expensive and arduous , making data recovery time-consuming and costly .

Solution

When the company was ready to proceed , Malloy approached Cohesity with the primary goal of replacing the legacy backup solution . He evaluated three vendors , but only took Cohesity through to the Proof of Concept ( PoC ). He was particularly attracted to the way Cohesity and Cisco were partnering to offer a flexible and comprehensive solution that is backed by Cisco Validated Designs ( CVDs ), and within that , Cisco HyperFlex was a huge draw .

Moving to a hyperconverged model would be a complete architectural change for Arnold Clark , but the company was drawn to its ability to allow for incremental , non-disruptive scaling over time so that relatively small-scale investments can be made as the business grows and changes .

Responsibility for ensuring constant uptime and 100 % reliable backup , restore and Disaster Recovery falls to Pat Malloy , Head of Networks and Platform Engineering . Malloy inherited a five-year-old solution built on what was , at that time , a very modern infrastructure .

Malloy knew the solution was cracking at the seams . It was difficult to scale and as the business had grown significantly since its deployment , the solution was reaching its limitations . Some of the pressing problems were : backup windows were not quick enough to ingest all data , separate backup and replication jobs were required for Disaster Recovery and low capacity

Moreover , getting this capability from the Cohesity- Cisco solution came in far more cost-effective than its nearest competitor . Both the initial outlay and manageable ongoing investment costs were a key factor in bringing the Arnold Clark Board on side with the Cohesity-Cisco solution .

Ransomware protection was another central consideration . Having conducted internal exercises , Arnold Clark was aware that it had insufficient protection against ransomware attacks , which needed to be addressed . The Cohesity-Cisco solution has an immutable file system ensuring backup protection

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