As the world’s leader in solutions for lifting, transportation, installation and decommissioning of large and heavy structures, Mammoet must deliver reliable IT data access to more than 5,000 staff working across hundreds of sites for clients with petrochemical, mining, civil engineering, power generation and offshore projects in harsh locations and climates worldwide.
Mammoet, whose motto is, “The biggest thing we move is time,” faced a notable challenge in early 2014. Backup jobs and the actual recovery of data were taking too much time, despite the use of at least five different specialised backup, de-duplication and Disaster Recovery (DR) tools, including EMC Avamar, Replication Manager, MirrorView and array-based replication. DR is a set of procedures to recover and protect a business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster.
The company's processes for setting up new environments for application development and testing (Dev/Test) were also consuming excess time, resources and money.
“We knew we needed something different, something more than a better backup or replication product,” said Global Technical Architect Rene Eickhoff, whom Mammoet brought in for the backup modernisation project. “Actifio’s approach of copy data virtualisation allowed us to eliminate multiple tools, and serve multiple needs: Fixing backups and DR, speeding up data access for testing, and even helping with migrations.”
Mammoet now has backups with rapid recovery enabled for its local production applications, most of which run on VMware vSphere and Microsoft SQL Server. Actifio Instant Mount capability lets Mammoet’s operations team recover or provision VMs or databases in minutes, as opposed to hours or days in the past. Disaster recovery is delivered via replication between Actifio appliances in three data centres in the Netherlands, Houston, and Singapore.
“If one of our apps or even a whole data centre goes down, we need to get it back up and running locally or in another data centre immediately, or we start losing time and money,” said Eickhoff. “That uptime is an important financial benefit Actifio is delivering us, in addition to the million Euros in cost savings we’re accruing - from reduced software, storage hardware, and maintenance expenses, not to mention staff operational time.”
“It’s a pleasure to work with cutting-edge enterprises such as Mammoet, who understand and can apply the greater benefits of our VDP™ technology to better protect and speed up their businesses,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO and co-founder of Actifio. “Mammoet is a great example of the thousands of large businesses who have the opportunity, with Actifio, to cut the extra time and cost from their backup and DR regimes, and also deliver instant data access for their development, QA and UAT groups.”
