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RDK Engineers have delivered highly reliable and innovative total building solutions for their clients for over a century. This success has fuelled significant company growth, allowing RDK to expand to five sites.

RDK's business growth correlates with their tremendous data growth in the form of engineering diagrams, schematics, photographs and 3D models created for each of their clients' projects. The growing number of copies of the data required costly and inefficient solutions to manage and protect the environment. RDK selected Actifio's Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) solution to handle their data management and protection needs, which reduced their data footprint dramatically and cut costs radically while enabling RDK to meet backup and recovery time objectives.

The business faced a number of common backup issues connected with managing data protection and disaster recovery across 5 locations: meeting disaster recovery requirement for clients required costly SAN-based solutions, there was limited bandwidth among the distributed locations, and crucial tape backups could not meet recovery time objectives with more than 8 TB/week being created.

RDK needed a solution that would not only satisfy their immediate requirements, but also scale without complexity as they continue to expand. That's why Stephen Reboulet, Manager of IT, decided that Actifio's PAS platform was the best solution for their needs: "Actifio's solution solved our immediate need for more efficient data protection and virtually eliminated the backup windows at all of our sites, but it also gave us a roadmap for how we're going to manage data growth in the future."

Managing, protecting and backing up just one site is complex enough. RDK's IT operations had to accomplish this over 5 separate sites, which introduced not only significant operational complexity but also costly hardware and software products to support the growing business.

Actifio immediately solved RDK's backup problem by reducing the data footprint by more than 90%. Actifio's Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology removed the unnecessary copies so that a single copy of a file or application data is used for everything from local data protection to disaster recovery to testing and development. By using the SLA policy creator, RDK created their copy data management schedules to automatically protect their physical and virtualized environments.

Because of Actifio, the IT staff's response time dramatically improved by utilising efficient snapshot technology, enabling instant recovery for end-users:

• File servers are backed up every 4 hours

• Production BlackBerry and print servers are snapshotted every night

• Accounting application is protected every 4 hours

• Nightly snapshots are retained for 7 days

• Weekly snapshots are retained for 3 weeks

• Monthly snapshot are retained for 1 year

• Standard weekly backups for the entire environment

Actifio snapshots are mounted and then backed up, eliminating the stage to disk for storage efficiency and backup window.

Actifio enabled RDK to eliminate their backup windows while providing greater data availability and storage efficiency. Reboulet found that Actifio helped reduce their TCO by reducing the number of software licenses needed to protect multiple sites and that they were able to double storage backup capacity with Actifio's built-in data deduplication. He comments: "I would never have done a backup during the day before Actifio - now nobody notices."

RDK found that Actifio helped them gain operational agility by consolidating many point solutions into one and by rebuilding how their distributed enterprise manages data copies for business continuity. With fewer point solutions, RDK could reduce the number of backup software licenses by 85% while moving to just one set of tapes per month for long term archiving. Most importantly, Actifio enabled RDK's IT team to be more responsive to outages while providing a greater level of service.