syncreon slashes $500,000 in total cost of ownership over three years with Commvault

Ensures continuous supply chain operations

syncreon provides tailored, progressive, and scalable supply chain solutions to premier automotive and technology brands around the world, including in the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Oceania. Its goal is to create long standing partnerships with customers by delivering flexible solutions while meeting the industry needs.

As a leading global supply chain provider, data is critical for syncreon to ensure a smooth and efficient operation for warehouses and transportation management. With massive data volumes and multiple data center locations, John Gallagher, Senior Manager, Global IT, Enterprise Systems and Cloud, at syncreon, saw the need to consolidate backup solutions and ensure data availability.

Lowers licensing and hardware costs by $500,000 over three years

Through acquisitions of companies over the years and changes in technology, syncreon ended up with six different backup solutions, including Veeam, Rubrik, Microsoft, HP Data Protector, Druva Phoenix, and Druva inSync. Each solution had its own licensing method—such as charging per CPU or data storage in the cloud, so it was difficult to manage and predict licensing costs.

Centralizing the overall administration of licensing with Commvault Complete Data Protection empowered syncreon to easily plan its IT budget based on per operating instances, such as by virtual server or by virtual machine, and save significant costs.

“We were up for $200,000 in lease buy out costs and support renewal costs with Rubrik in our Las Vegas data center. On top of this was another $300,000 if we decided to roll out the same solution to the Dublin data center,” said Gallagher. “By deploying Commvault, we avoided shelling out almost $500,000 over three years in licensing, lease buy outs on aging hardware, and new hardware costs and gained a predictable and flexible licensing model.”

Gallagher adds that cost was one of the main drivers but the ability to integrate with a wide range of systems was another key consideration.

“With Commvault, we now have the ability to back up HPE UX solutions, which wasn’t possible with Rubrik,” said Gallagher.

syncreon also adopted the endpoint protection feature with Commvault to automate the process of recovering files or data from over 2,500 laptops spanning across multiple locations.

“Commvault gives us confidence that our critical business data can be quickly recovered if a laptop was stolen or had some kind of ransomware attack,” said Gallagher

Slashing cloud storage costs by up to $72,000 over three years

syncreon used to back up the data locally and send the archived data to Amazon S3 for storage. With the data volume reaching almost 1PB, this approach was not cost effective. syncreon took the approach to purchase additional storage servers to keep a local copy on site for two weeks and send the secondary copy to the data centers.

“By leveraging Commvault to easily move the data back to the data centers, we have avoided paying up to $24,000 cloud storage costs per year to just $80,000 of storage hardware,” said Gallagher.

In addition, the previous process for backing up four databases was complicated. Each database would dump their own local backups to a flat file and then go to a local server, using disk space. Whatever the backup solution was using for the system would swallow that flat file.

“Commvault can actually do application-aware backups for all the four databases rather than having administrators manage those backups separately,” said Gallagher.

With the flexible reporting feature, syncreon can respond faster to compliance requests from customers or auditors, such as producing evidence for backups over a certain period.

“Thanks to Commvault, we can easily run a backup report for a particular site or customer via a single console instead of logging into different systems. It simplifies the process to meet our compliance needs,” said Gallagher.

Improves productivity with a centralized data protection platform

In the past, syncreon had different support teams—End device support, Database, Windows, and Linux—involved in managing six backup solutions. Now with Commvault, syncreon has a more centralized support team to manage all backups, including laptops and servers, across four data centers (two in Dublin and two in Las Vegas).

The consolidation also eliminated the need for the IT team to transport tapes to another site on a weekly basis. This helped syncreon free up resources within the team and allocate them to more business-driven projects.

“By centralizing the backups for all servers and endpoint devices globally with Commvault, we now have greater visibility of our overall data protection process and improved team productivity,” said Gallagher.

Commvault Command Center also provides role-based access control features for syncreon to assign tiered responsibility levels across different sites.

“The dashboard and reporting within Commvault enables our team to easily monitor and identify any backup issues without relying on a particular person or site. It gives us confidence that the data is secured and available,” said Gallagher.