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For the Dutch flower auction FloraHolland, the largest commercial center in the world in the field of floriculture, Databasement replaced traditional tape backups with tapeless backup solution based on deduplication technology.
Essential for a company like FloraHolland, with a turnover more than 4 billion euros per year, is the continuous availability of data at an affordable price. Traditional tape backup requirements therefore no longer met the high demands of the auction.
The transition to a tapeless backup solution worked out fine. Within FloraHolland cold feet were initially prevalent: tape handling is "old and familiar".
However a data storage device such as tape, has major disadvantages: no data protection, high handling costs, long restore times and large in size - and space is precious nowadays.
All these issues are resolved with deduplication from DataDomain. Once the internal organization was convinced, the decision was quickly made: Automating the backup process matches the innovative character of Flora Holland.
Not only the costs of hardware determine the selection, but also the management costs of the solution were included in the ROI calculation. "Databasement and their DataDomain solution has made us the best offer" said Hans Rietveld, supervisor infrastructure FloraHolland.
"The solution seamlessly connected in a technical sense with our requirements and we were confident that Databasement as partner would manage the implementation excellently.
The DataDomain solution of Databasement is so easy to manage that it has been implemented and maintained within the "Dark Room Policy" of FloraHolland. The Dark Room Policy is based upon research by Gartner which states that over 80% of all errors within IT infrastructures are human mistakes.
FloraHolland therefore has decided that all systems that can be placed behind closed doors (in the "Dark Room" computer centre), are kept there. A high degree of standardization of hardware is therefore required. The Data Domain solution (a "black box" ) matches the the philosophy of the dark room policy perfectly. This means that only the engineers with specific authorization have access, which reduces the risk of human mistakes significantly.
After the merger between Dutch Flower Auction Aalsmeer and the existing FloraHolland organisation (then with five locations) in 2008 under the name FloraHolland became a fact, the ICT departments joined forces. In this context, the Data Domain solution of Databasement assured all backup data from the location in Aalsmeer automatically being replicated to the location in Naaldwijk and vice versa.
Because the replica data contains the only real changes in the data, this replication occurs in the most efficient manner. Due to deduplication all double data within the stored data in the DataDomain is automatically removed. This results in a highly effective replication process.
The result is a smooth and fully automatic data replication process and FloraHolland has its data automatically protected against calamities in IT departments such as fire, prolonged power outages etc.
"The implementation has been performed to full satisfaction. The project was short and effective. For a next project we will certainly approach Databasement again" says Hans Rietveld. "The experience of Databasement in Dark Room operations (Databasement manages around 2,500 TB of data for its customers) gave us the confidence that Databasement, with its solutions, offered additional added value. Because the deduplication is performed online, this backup solution is the best available. Others perform deduplication afterwards, which costs extra time and space."