INTERNATIONAL SOS GmbH Improving performance and reducing backup volumes with EMC

ESSENTIALS Industry

Healthcare

Company Size

More than 10,000 employees

Business Challenges

• Existing storage could not support virtualization

• Tape-based backup system was inefficient and costly

• Data recovery took many hours or even an entire day

Solutions

• EMC VNX unified storage

• EMC FAST Suite

• VMware vSphere

• EMC Data Domain

• Microsoft SharePoint

Results

• Improved storage performance by five to six times

• Reduced backup volumes by almost 95 percent

• Reduced data recovery times from hours to minutes

OVERVIEW International SOS is the leading service provider of medical assistance and travel security services, with more than 10,000 employees (including 1,200 doctors and 200 security experts) in more than 70 countries. For more than 25 years, the Singapore and London-based company has provided services to companies and organizations from all industries with employees in foreign countries exposed to specific security and health risks. International SOS has a global network of assistance centers and clinics. In addition, the service provider operates almost 700 medical facilities at customer sites on five continents.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES International SOS provides 24-hour service across all time zones and on all five continents The International SOS location in Philadelphia provides basic services to the European subsidiaries, such as a centrally maintained database application with global physician and clinic data. In contrast, primarily local applications, such as those for customer and case management or Microsoft SharePoint, as well as print and file services, are made available at the regional level. The Neu-Isenburg, Germany data center provides the Benelux countries and the DACH region with these services.

"IT systems that run smoothly are absolutely critical in our field of work," says Sven Scheiner, responsible for IT and telecommunications at the German location in Neu-Isenburg.

International SOS had virtualized nearly 100 percent of the servers in its Neu-Isenburg location with VMware® vSphere™. However, doing so led to performance issues with its existing storage systems because they were simply overextended.

The company also had problems with its tape-based backup system. The system servers only had capacity for two daily backups. Older backups had to be transferred to a tape library, costing time and money. In addition, data recovery could take hours or even a full day.

To address these challenges, International SOS sought to replace its storage and backup systems. After evaluating solutions from EMC, NetApp, and Dell with the help of EMC partner, inforsacom, the company chose EMC® VNX® unified storage and EMC Data Domain® deduplication storage and system.

"VNX was the only solution to offer native Fibre Channel support," explains Sven Scheiner. "All of the other systems we considered would have meant significantly higher costs for connecting to the existing storage area network."

CUSTOMER PROFILE

SOLUTIONS International SOS implemented VNX along with the EMC FAST™ Suite (including FAST VP and FAST Cache), which provides fully automated storage tiering. The company also chose EMC Data Domain deduplication storage and system to address its backup and data recovery issues.

IMPROVING STORAGE PERFORMANCE In the Neu-Isenburg data center, VNX supports approximately 80 virtual machines running on three physical servers. The VNX is configured with 35 conventional SAS disks, each with 600 gigabytes, and two high-performance, 100-gigabyte SSD drives. The FAST Suite ensures that storage blocks with particularly high access frequency are saved on SSD, while blocks accessed less often are stored on SAS disks. The entire process is fully automated so that IT administrators in Neu-Isenburg can take care of more important things.

"Virtualization at first caused massive performance problems, because our old storage system was simply overextended," explains Sven Scheiner. "But with VNX and the FAST Suite, despite the relatively small number of expensive SSD drives, our performance has improved five to six-fold.".

"Virtualization at first caused massive performance problems, because our old storage system was simply overextended. But with VNX and the EMC FAST Suite, despite the relatively small number of expensive SSD drives, our performance has improved five to sixfold." Sven Scheiner Regional IT Manager at International SOS GmbH

REDUCING BACKUP VOLUMES BY ALMOST 95 PERCENT The storage system supplier, inforsacom, also specializes in customized recovery solutions and suggested Data Domain as the answer to International SOS' backup issues.

"With its highly effective deduplication mechanism, Data Domain was able to solve not only the urgent capacity problem at International SOS, but at the same time it created a foundation for significantly shortened restore times," explains Manuela Gluszko, Account Manager at inforsacom.

A look at International SOS' Data Domain interface at the end of February 2013 showed the following: 68 terabytes of backup volume requiring only 3.6 terabytes on the Data Domain system—equaling a compression factor of 18.8.

ACCELERATING DATA RESTORE FROM MANY HOURS TO ONLY A FEW MINUTES In Neu-Isenburg, Data Domain deduplication means that now the entire backup inventory from a full four weeks, instead of only two days as before, can be stored on disks in the Data Domain system. These four weeks are the exact amount of time in which the majority of requests for a data restore are submitted. Thus, it is no longer necessary to spend time looking through magnetic tapes.

"Data recovery that once took many hours or even an entire day now takes only a few minutes," summarizes Sven Scheiner.

In the meantime, the German Data Domain solution has become a topic of conversation at the IT base in Paris. The Neu-Isenburg installation may soon set an example for other International SOS locations.

CONTACT US To learn more about how EMC products, services, and solutions can help solve your business and IT challenges, contact your local representative or authorized reseller—or visit us at www.EMC.com.

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EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, Data Domain, FAST, and VNX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware and vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc., in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 02/14 Customer Profile H12670 EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.