Hong Kong’s energy and mobility infrastructure specialist achieves 5 times faster data backup while increasing agility with Commvault                                  

Challenge

• Performing replication across four offsite locations with a legacy backup solution that was time consuming and unreliable
• Needed a single solution to backup and restore data from different sources, including physical machines and virtual machines, while supporting roadmap to integrate other cloud technologies and Microsoft 365

Solution

• Adopted Commvault Complete™️ Backup & Recovery with HPE Nimble storage to optimize backup performance and offsite replication
• Commvault Partner Octotech provided recommendations and support throughout the implementation

Result

• Up to 5 times faster backup completion from multiple sources
• 100% success rate when performing offsite replication compared to 50% failure rate with the company’s previous solution
• Doubled archive copies without increasing backup duration
• Achieved 88% deduplication ratio and cut storage capacity by more than 190TB
• Supports future roadmap to integrate with other cloud technologies and Microsoft 365

Adopting a reliable backup solution to support cloud roadmap

Kum Shing Group (Kumshing) has been playing a leading role in the development, operation and maintenance of Hong Kong’s energy and mobility infrastructure for decades.

With more than 2,000 employees across the region and multibillion-dollar active contracts, Kumshing offers a full range of customized and specialist services to power utilities, transportation, and public sector clients including CLP Power, HK Electric, MTR Corporation, Airport Authority and public works departments of the Hong Kong Government. With a huge increase in data volume and data types distributed across different geographies, Jerry Wong, IT Manager at Kum Shing Group wanted to ensure their IT infrastructure could support growing business needs and improve competitive edge.

“One of our key goals is to increase the agility, resilience and security of data backup by migrating to cloud technology over the next two years,” said Wong. “To ensure our corporate data and customer information are protected, we wanted to deploy a single solution to backup data from multiple sources—cloud, Microsoft 365, servers, physical machines, and virtual machines—and perform offsite replication. Only Commvault can fulfill all these requirements.”

Slashing time for backups and offsite replication

The basic technology for electricity hasn’t changed much over the past several decades, but safety procedures and operations have changed significantly, and have affected how engineering companies manage their projects.

Kumshing uses gadgets to take photos and video reference along with their reports to clients showing that projects are proceeding accurately and on-schedule. The archiving of these multimedia files led to an exponential growth of data. In addition to lots of fragmentation files (huge number of several megabytes files), the previous backup solution could not handle such large data sets, resulting in poor quality of backups.

“With Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery, we can reliably complete incremental backups in less than two hours and full backups in just 10 hours, instead of 10 hours and 48 hours respectively,” said Wong. “Offsite replication can also be done via the general broadband without failures. This saved us two to three hours per day to follow up or troubleshoot the issues we had with the previous backup solution as the failures rate was almost 50%.”

With the increased efficiency and reliability of backups, the IT team was able to focus more on the business roadmap instead of troubleshooting. “Previously, we spent a lot of time to ensure the backups were secured. Now with Commvault, backup is so easy. We just nearly forget about backups because I know that it is done 100% each time,” said Wong.

Doubling archive copies without increasing storage capacity

Kumshing has increased its offices from four to seven over the last few years. Wong and his team wanted to further improve the backup duration by optimizing the data linkage between Commvault and the HPE Nimble storage solution.

“By integrating Commvault with HPE Nimble, we can increase our backups frequency to twice daily or 60 backup copies per month without doubling the backup duration,” said Roy Chan, IT Infrastructure Technician at Kum Shing Group.

The deduplication feature of Commvault also made it easier for Kumshing to increase the archive copies without expanding storage capacity.

“Thanks to Commvault, we realized 88% deduplication ratio and saved storage capacity by more than 190TB,” said Chan.

With the assistance from Commvault Partner Octotech, Kumshing determined their business requirements for the backup solution. After evaluating different vendors and conducting tests, Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery came out on top as the most suitable solution.

“We chose Commvault over others because of its leading position in Gartner and its capability to support our roadmap to integrate with other cloud technologies and Microsoft 365,” said Wong. “Using Commvault for backup and recovery is fast, secure and reliable. Not every vendor can do this.”

Link: https://www.commvault.com/resources/case-study-kum-shing-group