As a leading digital technology service company, UST Global has experienced a data explosion and needed to adopt faster data storage techniques. Its deployment of Commvault Backup & Recovery has resulted in consolidating backup and recovery of enterprise workloads and end-user data across geographically distributed data centers and users in 25 countries across four continents.
UST Global is a leading digital technology services company that guides Global 1000 companies through their critical Digital Transformation journey to drive higher business value.
UST Global specializes in six next generation digital services – design, cybersecurity, mobile, social, analytics and cloud. Headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, UST Global has more than 17,000 associates and operates in 25 countries across four continents. Data is core to UST Global’s business operations and critical in its mission to provide clients with high quality services, as well as its commitment to long-term customer success.
UST Global currently manages a large daily load of more than 50 terabytes of business-critical data assets, from day-to-day operations to sensitive customer information.
Racing ahead of the pack
As a leading digital technology service company, UST Global has experienced first-hand the rapid pace of technological advancement. As a sprawling business with global operations, massive amounts of business information were being created and stored outside of the data center every day. With data explosion came the requirements to adopt faster data storage techniques.
UST Global used a tiered storage approach for its primary location, which included a tape-based backup with auxiliary copies to disk and site replication for Disaster Recovery. The offsite replication served both Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity requirements.
UST Global then partnered with Commvault to take its DR to the next level, by duplicating entire virtual machines into the DR location. This improvement provides an immense benefit as it allows for warm DR capabilities of both data and applications per individual lines of business. This seamless workload replication moves terabytes of data across data centers, while also taking advantage of built-in Commvault deduplication, data analytics and fast recovery.
Protecting endpoint data at the Edge of the network is an important priority. The goal of mitigating data threats, while still maintaining the ability to find, secure, protect and manage all data resulted in a consolidation of its existing backup and recovery efforts across multiple data centers spanning Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Bangalore, Chennai, Manila and the US.
This also resulted in improved speed of data restoration for their data center workloads, while also achieving better recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO).
The integration of Commvault Endpoint protection completely in AWS was one of the early adopters in the APAC region, driving location-agnostic data protection for UST Global’s top executive users, while still retaining control over all its data – wherever it resided.
“In this digital world, no business can afford to be down for any considerable time. The acceptable recovery period is narrowing in line with customer expectations, so it is important for us to stay ahead and be prepared for any outages, no matter the cause,” said Praveen Raveendran, Global Head, IS Infrastructure Team, UST Global.
Adopting Commvault solutions has enabled Disaster Recovery for better Business Continuity and has opened up greater possibilities for UST Global to integrate with public cloud platforms including AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Greater options for a changing future
UST Global’s recovery and backup requirements covered many aspects. UST Global needed to provide comprehensive coverage across physical servers, virtual machines, endpoints and several mission critical applications, such as Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft SQL and MySQL databases and Windows File System storage instances.
Through Commvault, UST Global was able to centralize its backups and manage the data recovery of its entire portfolio of servers and applications from a single pane. Managing both near-line recovery to disks as well as long-term backups to tape from a single platform has also optimized data restoration times across its 50 TB environment.
While that provides protection for its existing data, UST Global understood that it needed to account for changes in technology today if it was to continue to be competitive tomorrow.
“Technology changes happen so rapidly in this digital world. Thus our focus is to be ahead of the game in all aspects. Our solution vision is not limited to just support today’s workloads, but tomorrow’s as well. Commvault’s native integration with cloud providers and the options that its platform offers represents an investment to us in how we approach the future in an open vendor manner,” said Sunil Kanchi, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President, UST Global.
“Even if new advances in technology change best practice, we have the confidence that we can quickly adapt and make the best use of it, without being locked into any specific cloud provider or proprietary technology,” said Sam Felix, Infrastructure Architect, UST Global.
Now that UST Global has in place a flexible platform, it has the option to further protect selected critical virtual machines at its Chennai site and perform automated backup, replication and restoration.
Not only that, but it can also include mission critical physical servers in its Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans through Commvault’s Virtualize Me function.
A partner now and tomorrow
UST Global has trusted Commvault with protecting its data for seven years. When choosing a partner to optimize its data recovery operations, Commvault was again its vendor of choice not only because of its technology offerings, but also the customer experience when it came to product use, support and professional services.
“Commvault’s professional services contributed to hassle-free operations. Also, its training programs helped build expertise with our engineers,” said Raveendran. “Its vision of data management and what it can do for businesses like ours is the most complete, yet also represents a compelling case when it comes to the total cost of ownership. We’re pleased to continue entrusting them with our protection needs now and into the future.”
Although UST Global had been using another backup solution for its VDI workload, the benefits of using a single platform, along with the consistent support and cost savings that came with consolidating its data protection, meant that the move to Commvault was an easy decision to make.
UST Global has seen immense benefits in leveraging its existing Commvault footprint. By implementing Disaster Recovery in addition to the core off-site backup functionality, UST Global has been able to grow its data management maturity over the years. This journey saves costs by eliminating the need to further spend on expensive storage-based replication software, which would further create unnecessary complexity.
Gaining the competitive edge by knowing your data
In today’s increasingly crowded market, leveraging data for insights is the only lasting way for companies to get a leg up on the competition. UST Global’s proactive approach to Disaster Recovery helps it stay agile to tackle any outages or data security threats, which are only becoming more sophisticated each day.
“Data is the heart of our business operations. It is critical in our mission to provide clients with high-quality services and commitment to their long-term success by ensuring sensitive customer information is well protected in our hands, backup with world class Business Continuity systems,” said Raveendran.
