CUSTOMER SUCCESS
Michael Page International
Making Backup Even Faster than Rapid Company Growth, with
Solutions from Symantec and Microware Limited
Michael Page International, a leading recruiting agency, was growing fast in
Asia and so was the data it needed to back up. It had outgrown its prior backup
solution and was facing challenges in meeting backup windows and performing
fast recoveries. The firm turned to Symantec and Symantec Platinum Partner
Microware Limited for solutions. Results include a 30 percent reduction in
backup time, up to 96 percent reduction in recovery times, and 428 staff hours
a year reclaimed for more valuable tasks such as support of company growth.
ORGANIZATION PROFILE
A need for speed
STRATEGIC IT TRENDS
Patrick Kan and his IT team were facing a mystery, and they didn’t have a lot of time to solve it.
Information Explosion
Their employer, Michael Page International, is a leading professional recruitment consultancy. It
provides an important resource for clients, especially in fast-growing Asian economies: Few things
make more of a difference in a business than finding the right person for a critical job. Michael
Page performs this service so effectively that it has grown from a single office in London to 164
offices in 34 countries in a span of just 30 years. It now brings in more than US$1 billion in annual
revenue.
Patrick and his team, based in Hong Kong, have been supporting that growth by working hard to
provision new Michael Page offices in Asia with IT services. In the past two years, they’ve opened
five new offices, bringing the total there to 17. The number of Michael Page employees they support
in Asia has climbed 50 percent from 400 to 600.
The firm’s IT services play a key role in enhancing its competitive edge, Patrick says. “We use IT to
streamline our client experience, providing speed and excellent service,” he notes. “We get things
out the door as fast as possible, and our system quickly matches candidates with client needs.”
Website: michaelpage.com.hk
Industry: Business Services
Headquarters: Hong Kong
Employees: 600
SYMANTEC SOLUTIONS
Data Protection
Virtualization
Cloud
Why Symantec?
· Fast backup of
complex file
structure, unlike
other solutions tested
· Fast recoveries
compared to
prior solution
· Easy scalability
enhanced by
deduplication
· Reclaims staff time
for more valuable
tasks through
greater efficiency
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
MICHAEL PAGE INTERNATIONAL
Getting rid of a headache
SOLUTIONS AT A GLANCE
The backup process, however, was becoming
a headache for the six-person IT team. Data
was growing at 50 to 60 percent annually,
and there were 2.5 terabytes to protect.
That’s not a particularly large amount of
data, Patrick notes, but it consists mostly of
Sybase records from the firm’s proprietary
customer relationship management (CRM)
application, and it posed unusual backup
challenges.
Key Challenges
“The file structure of our CRM application has
tens of thousands of folders,” Patrick says.
“Every folder contains a single instance of
someone’s resume, and the big problem for
us is that most backup solutions aren’t able
to manage the file structure very efficiently.
Our previous backup solution was
overwhelmed—especially in recoveries.” A
recovery of 1.8 terabytes of the data, for
instance, took three to four days.
Michael Page’s United Kingdom offices were
using BakBone software for data protection,
now owned by Dell Quest, and Patrick
evaluated the solution as an alternative. “It
didn’t seem to solve the file structure
challenge we had, but Symantec NetBackup
did,” Patrick says. “We decided to go with
NetBackup.”
Slashing backup time by 30 percent
The gains have been dramatic. “Symantec
NetBackup enables us to do a full backup in
8 hours that took 12 hours with our prior
solution,” says Patrick. “We have an eighthour backup window, so we could only do
differential backups before, and it was
challenging to get everything backed up that
we wanted. Now we can.”
There’s added flexibility. “Doing a full backup
nightly helps us do recoveries faster,” Patrick
says. “Recovering 1.8 terabytes of data took
three to four days with our prior solution, and
it takes just three to four hours with Symantec
NetBackup, a 96 percent reduction.”
There are other benefits. Email is one of
Michael Page’s most business-critical
applications, and the Symantec NetBackup™
Data Protection Optimization option
•Provide faster backup and recovery of
complex CRM file structure
•Reclaim staff time with greater accuracy
and efficiency
•Enhance backup and recovery performance
in virtualized environment
•Increase data protection scalability and
enhance disaster recovery
Symantec Products
•Symantec NetBackup™ 7.5 with
o Agent for Microsoft Exchange Server
o NetBackup Data Protection Optimization
BUSINESS RESULTS AND
TECHNICAL BENEFITS
Data Protection
•Nearly 100% backup success rate, up from
70% with prior solution
•Fivefold greater capacity for online data
retention
Operational Efficiency
•30% reduction in backup time, enabling
nightly full instead of incremental backup
•96% reduction in recovery time for 1.8 TB
•US$1,700 in disk space saved by 3.5:1
NetBackup Deduplication
o NetBackup Enterprise Disk
•As much as 88% reduction in server and
email recovery time, reclaiming as much as
168 staff hours a year*
Symantec Services
•50% reduction in backup administration,
reclaiming 260 hours per year
•Symantec Education Services
•Symantec Essential Support Services
Symantec Platinum Partner
•Microware Limited
(www.microware.com.hk)
•Specializations: Data Protection with
NetBackup, Archiving and eDiscovery, Data
Protection with Backup Exec™, Enterprise
Security, Small and Medium Business, Storage Management
Technology Environment
•Server platform: 80 VMs using VMware ESX
5.0 on HP ProLiant BL460c, BL465c, and
BL495c server blades running Windows
Server 2008 R2 and 2003
•Applications: Citrix Presentation Server
4.5, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
•Databases: Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server
2005
•Storage: HP EVA, EMC Data Domain
•Tape library: HP
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
MICHAEL PAGE INTERNATIONAL
deduplicates the firm’s email backup by a
3.5:1 ratio, reducing saving drive space
worth a total of HK$13,400 (US$1,700). The
NetBackup agent for Microsoft Exchange
Server enables nondisruptive protection of
Exchange database and mailbox components,
including mailbox-level backup.
Increasing on-site retention fivefold
Michael Page had been backing up directly to
tape with its prior solution, keeping a week’s
worth of tapes on site and sending older
tapes off site for disaster recovery (DR)
purposes.
The IT team redesigned the data protection
architecture to support a disk-to-disk-totape strategy instead of disk-to-tape,
enabling faster recoveries and longer
retention on site. It is using the NetBackup
Enterprise Disk option, which includes the
NetBackup OpenStorage API, to integrate
NetBackup with a Data Domain appliance.
The appliance acts as a virtual tape library
(VTL), and is the target for backup data from
the company’s CRM application. (NetBackup
appliances hadn’t yet been introduced when
Michael Page deployed NetBackup.)
“We can now keep five weeks of data on site,”
Patrick says. “The ability of NetBackup to
integrate with Data Domain and the
increased amount of retention capability we
have in our VTL makes our restoration
process much easier. Let’s say we need to
restore an individual email. In the past,
because of infrastructure and storage
constraints, we had to restore the entire
Exchange database, and then search it for
the mailbox we need and extract the email. It
took a member of the IT staff an entire day.
Now we can get that email back in an hour
or two.”
The IT team performs about two recoveries a
month, Patrick says. The new solution saves
as much as 7 hours with each recovery,
reclaiming as much as 168 hours a year of
staff time.* Trimming 8 hours to 1 is an 88
percent reduction.
Virtual recovery cut from a day
to hours
About 80 percent of Michael Page’s server
environment has been virtualized using
VMware, Patrick adds, and that percentage
will increase. The IT team plans on virtualizing
every new server that doesn’t absolutely
require a dedicated physical system.
Backing up a virtualized environment can be
complex, but Symantec NetBackup lets the
IT team see and manage its virtual and
physical servers from a single console. It
simplifies the data protection process in
several ways, Patrick notes. In the past, when
a server needed to be recovered, “it took time
to rebuild the server, and then restore the
data onto it,” he says. “Now, with Symantec
NetBackup, we back up an entire host and all
the VMs inside it in a single pass. It’s like
having a snapshot of a particular server for a
point in time, and we can always refer back
to it. And we don’t have to manually rebuild
a server. The time it takes to restore a server
has been dramatically reduced from a day to
a few hours.”
With just one backup pass of the virtualized
environment, NetBackup captures both the
VMDK image of the virtualized server, and
the granular files within it. “That’s one of the
features that most attracted us to
NetBackup,” Patrick says.
Enhancing disaster recovery
NetBackup also gives Michael Page new
flexibility in disaster recovery. The IT team
plans on having a remote site for disaster
recovery eventually. “Meanwhile, Symantec
NetBackup has alleviated a lot of the need for
a mirrored data center because it enables
our appliance, with our data and server
images, to be taken to another data center
and we can bring our services back up,”
Patrick says. “We plan to take that a step
further and potentially use NetBackup to
move our backup storage to the cloud, so
that remote data centers can act as our VTLs,
and we’ll no longer have to ship tapes
off site.”
“Backups used to give me a lot of
headaches, but not anymore. With
Symantec NetBackup, we can
back up everything we need, even
if we continue to increase our
”
database at the current rate.
Patrick Kan
Asia IT Manager
Michael Page International
“I’ve seen plenty of evidence of
Microware Limited’s NetBackup
expertise validated by their specialist
credential. That’s why I’m giving them
”
rave remarks for their support.
Patrick Kan
Asia IT Manager
Michael Page International
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
MICHAEL PAGE INTERNATIONAL
Gaining 260 hours a year for growth
Backup administration took two hours a day
in the prior environment, and NetBackup has
reduced that by 50 percent, Patrick notes,
reclaiming an additional 260 hours a year of
staff time. “Troubleshooting backups used to
require two of the most senior people on my
team,” he says. “Now I can focus that time
and more of everyone’s energies on tasks
that are more valuable and urgent, such as
expanding an office.”
Behind significant gains: the right
support
Key differences have been made not just by
technology, but by people. “When we
purchased NetBackup, Symantec offered us
training from Symantec Education Services,
and I had three network administrators
attend a three-day training,” says Patrick.
“They learned how to better tune our backups
and fix any failures if they occurred. The
backup success rate has increased
significantly, from about 70 percent with the
prior solution to nearly 100 percent now. The
support and classes we get from Symantec
have been outstanding.”
Microware Limited has a Data Protection
with NetBackup specialist credential from
Symantec. It was earned by passing tests and
validating customer satisfaction. “I’ve seen
plenty of evidence of Microware Limited’s
NetBackup expertise validated by their
specialist credential,” Patrick says. “We had
several issues when we first implemented
NetBackup, and they patiently helped us
through it—that’s why I’m giving them rave
remarks for their support.”
“With Symantec NetBackup, we
back up an entire host and all the
VMs inside it in a single pass. The
time it takes to restore a server
has been dramatically reduced
”
from a day to a few hours.
Patrick Kan
Asia IT Manager
Michael Page International
Michael Page contracts with Symantec
Essential Support Services to have 24×7
access to Symantec experts when needed.
“Backups used to give me a lot of headaches,
but not anymore,” Patrick says. “With
Symantec NetBackup, we can back up
everything we need, and the technology is
scalable. Even if we continue to increase our
database at the current rate—which is very
fast—we’ll still be able to capture all the data
in a single night.”
*
2 recoveries a month = 24 recoveries a year. 24 × up to 7 hours
saved per recovery = up to 168 hours of staff time reclaimed
per year
For help designing and configuring the
NetBackup solution, Michael Page turned to
its long time technology advisor Microware
Limited, a Symantec Platinum Partner.
“Microware Limited gives us support second
to none,” Patrick says. “We’re very
comfortable going to them with questions on
Symantec solutions. We get fast responses
and a very clear explanation of everything.”
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