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Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, Amazon subsidiary LoveFilm has become the leading online DVD rental and streaming service in the UK and across Europe. It has more than 2 million subscribers and offers over 70,000 titles to rent by post plus thousands of movies and TV series to watch instantly. The streaming service was recently rebranded as Amazon Prime Instant Video, while the LoveFilm brand remains for the postal service.

Several acquisitions had left LoveFilm with an infrastructure to improve upon. Following its purchase by Amazon in 2011, the company went through an integration process. Paul Houghton, IT Infrastructure Analyst at LoveFilm and Gregg Braden, Head of IT, were charged with managing the process and given a brief to tidy up the disparate solutions at the company.

LoveFilm's first step to modernise the infrastructure was to virtualise, which was completed in 2012. LoveFilm now has over a hundred virtual servers, several vSQL databases and 8 physical servers. Most of the infrastructure is based in two data centres with a disaster recovery site based at a remote location.

The existing back up systems had evolved with a variety of solutions but it was becoming harder to manage, the licensing was very confusing and getting more expensive and it was also becoming a complete headache for the company.

Looking for something to simplify and improve their backup strategy, Paul Houghton found Unitrends and began to research the product. At first sight, it appeared easy to use and enjoyed good support. Most importantly, it had a good reputation for integration with virtualisation software. Paul Houghton describes this as "a big bonus. Lots of providers say they do this but it's not true". The company had already looked at a virtual solution but discovered it was unable to protect LoveFilm's physical servers. "We needed a solution that could protect both our physical and virtual environments," Houghton says.

LoveFilm opted for a Unitrends Recovery-943 appliance and its Unitrends Enterprise Backup software. The Recovery-943 is the industry's first tiered storage high-density enterprise class backup appliance with 36TB drives configured in a RAID-60 to optimise redundancy and performance. It is specifically designed to allow parallel commit of metadata and backup streams. The Unitrends Enterprise Backup software is a software-only virtual appliance that can protect virtual and physical infrastructure.

DOES WHAT IT SAYS ON THE TIN
The Recovery-943 is installed at the primary data centre in the Docklands to underpin the company's IT environment and SAN. The Unitrends Enterprise Backup software appliance is on a virtual machine at the DR site in Islington. The company has 40TB of backup capacity. The products were installed in hours and the system was up and running in less than a month despite LoveFilm expecting it to take three months to complete. "It was all so easy," Houghton says. "And it does exactly what it says on the tin. It's an easy to use, great backup system."

WORKING IN A VIRTUALISED ENVIRONMENT
As promised, the Unitrends solution works very well with LoveFilm's virtualised environment. It has proven to be easy to use, cost effective and easy to restore from. On those occasions when LoveFilm has suffered issues with VMS and its SAN, the restore has been quick and easy.

The ability to take snapshots and protect virtual servers once a day is a valuable feature in the Unitrends solution, as is the capability to backup incremental changes to the vSQL machines on an hourly basis. Unitrends also provides daily incremental backups for the physical servers.

Braden is very impressed with what Unitrends has done for LoveFilm. "We've worked with lots of suppliers that promise the earth; Unitrends has actually delivered," he says.
More info: www.unitrends.com