Tapeless Backup solution increases Backup speed and adds Disaster Recovery at GLS Companies 

About GLS Companies

GLS Companies is a full-service Integrated Communication Solutions provider based in Brooklyn Park, MN that specializes in providing award-winning content creation, state-of-the-art web design, sheetfed and digital printing, lettershop/on-site mailing services and flexible distribution services.

The Challenge

GLS Companies has hundreds of clients that rely on large graphic files for most projects. These files are the largest contributors to their 5 TB daily backup footprint. They also have the unique need of continuously restoring these files, often over 20 times a day, due to clients reusing the same graphic files throughout the year. Their primary backup solution was utilizing tape backup, but due to the time and reliability concerns, tape was falling behind their needs. GLS could only do a full tape backup over an entire weekend, and was rarely able to do an incremental backup during the week. Furthermore, tape couldn’t provide a disaster recovery option. The tape library couldn’t physically leave their office with the amount of restores being performed. GLS’s tape library was also a significant investment to maintain, without keeping up with their business needs, and they wanted to know: “How do you speed up the backup process while getting your data offsite without physically moving the data?”

The Solution 

Nexus Information Systems introduced the idea of using Data Domain technology to eliminate backing up and restoring duplicated data, deduplication (or dedupe), which could resolve their backup and disaster recovery challenges.

“After the Nexus Information Systems solution, we could do a full backup daily! It continually exceeded expectations. We get 10:1 dedupe for our graphic files because Data Domain technology digs down to the bits, and can transform 10 versions of a file into one main file while backing up only the small changes to each version.”

By architecting a solution using two Data Domain appliances, at two separate GLS locations connected by private leased lines, GLS was able to achieve their backup and DR goals better than with their tape solution.

“This puts us ahead of the big boys who are trucking tapes across country because our data isn’t leaving the office, yet we still have a disaster recovery site. With a traditional DR site, it’s going to take a week to get your data back, but with Data Domain you don’t have that, you have a reasonable restore timeframe.”

Nexus Information Systems was there for the whole solution process and brought their superior expertise and experience from the consultation through the implementation.

“You definitely need someone like Nexus Information Systems when you're getting into this. They really came through for us to get this solution working in our IT environment.”

Click here to download Success Story...