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Creating production measurement products requires a complex, data-intensive working environment. Technicians and engineers draw on a variety of different computer-aided design (CAD) systems that create gigabyte-sized images and large video files. The company's 1,700 employees are constantly using databases, which include MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft Exchange, and Windows applications, such as Office and SharePoint. The result is a massive amount of data that is constantly increasing.

KEEPING UP AS VOLUMES DOUBLE
For years the IT team has trusted Quantum to provide new technology to help the company manage its evolving backup and disaster recovery needs. Initially, the IT team replaced its multiple external tape drives with its first tape library when its data outgrew the older system's capacity. Later the team moved to the next generation of tape libraries, the Quantum Scalar i500, and Quantum's early DXi-Series disk backups and deduplication appliances. "Over the last five years, our data volume has doubled, and keeping up has become an ever-increasing challenge," explains Thomas Wendt, The Mahr Group's backup administrator.

However, as The Mahr Group's IT team added server virtualisation, new data-intensive applications, and large-scale, network-attached storage (NAS), the amount of backup data once again began to outpace the ability of the old infrastructure to keep up. "We had a robust tape library in the Quantum Scalar i500 that could scale up to an impressive capacity of 2.6PB," says Gerd Wiechers, The Mahr Group's head of IT. "But now we needed a new solution, which could, on the one hand, increase backup performance and reduce capacity requirements, and, on the other, dovetail easily into the existing infrastructure and make administration more efficient."

NEXT-GEN BACKUP & DEDUPLICATION
For its next-generation backup solution, The Mahr Group selected Quantum's DXi6700 Series deduplication appliance. The disk-based backup solution, along with the existing Scalar i500 tape library, has since become the foundation for the company's entire backup operation - providing fast performance and low administrative overhead.

"Quantum has impressed us every time we have implemented a new solution because they have what we need and the installations have always been completed in just one day," says Wiechers. "This has helped the team meet their schedule and budget targets."

With the new system, the IT team was able to establish an optimal set of backup processes:

= Data from the virtual machines (VMs) is written to the DXi using Veeam Backup & Replication software
= Data on the NAS system is written to the DXi using Symantec Backup Exec
= Data on the DXi is written to the Scalar i500 tape library using a direct path-to-tape that does not send the data through the backup server
= The backup of the databases is written directly to tape.

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