HPE P9G72A Product Data Sheet

Tech Data
accelerates backups in

Case Study

Objective

Ensure business continuity with
a flexible and fully auditable
backup solution

Approach

Used industr y specialist to assist
in upgrading legacy backup software
from HPE

IT Matters

• Reliable, automated backup creation

• Single console view delivers easy to
manage and maintain data backup

• Federated deduplication function
reduces backup data volumes

Business Matters

• Ensures business continuity
in the event of a disaster

• Auditor-approved backup strategy
ensures business compliance

• Integrates easily into new and
expanding IT environments

a complex environment

HPE Data Protector secures data for one
of world’s largest IT distributors

Challenge

Audit-proof backups for a
heterogeneous environment

The Tech Data Corporation is one
of the world’s largest distributors of
IT products, services and solutions.
With highly developed logistics capabilities
and tried-and-tested value-add services,
Tech Data supports more than 115,000
distribution partners in over 100 countries,
helping them to meet their customers’
unique technological demands eiciently
and cost-eectively.

The company has experienced strong
growth in recent years, both organically
and through acquisitions. For example,
its takeover of SDG in 2012 brought
a great number of IT distributors in
Great Britain, France and the Netherlands
into the company.

“This strong growth has led to an average
annual increase in data volumes of around
10 per cent in recent years. And it’s
obviously been even higher in years
in which we’ve made acquisitions,”
explains Oliver Wriedt, IT Administrator
at Tech Data’s European headquarters
in Munich. Wriedt is responsible for
backing up all of the data outside
of the core SAP system.

The company’s core applications include
products developed in-house as well as
SAP Business Information Warehouse, SAP
Supply Chain Management and SAP CRM.
These applications are absolutely critical to
the IT distributor’s operations as without
them, it would not be able to deliver any of
its products.

Case study

Tech Data

“The main benefit of HPE Data Protector is that it can support very

– Oliver Wriedt, IT Administrator, Tech Data

Industry

IT Service Provider

heterogeneous IT landscapes. We have been able to integrate
everything very easily and create audit-friendly backups quickly,
even for new environments.”

Page 2

One of the key factors on which auditors
assess companies is whether risks, that
could halt business processes, are kept to an
absolute minimum. Regular, secure backups
are therefore extremely important for Tech
Data as they enable it to quickly restore its
data, applications and databases.

Solution

HPE Data Protector as standard
across the company

Tech Data has been using HPE Data
Protector software to create its backups
for almost 20 years.

“As the backups are reliable, we can
guarantee high availability for all of our
user data. Our business processes will
always continue to run without interruption
and that means that our systems pass the
strict audits every time,” says Wriedt.

“The main benefit for us in the IT
department is that the software is incredibly
flexible in terms of the dierent systems
it can connect with. It supports a great
number of heterogeneous systems. This
is particularly beneficial when we acquire
new companies, and is a key reason for our
decision to make HPE Data Protector our
standard backup software.”

Tech Data’s IT landscape is unusually
heterogeneous. Its data centre covers
almost every operating system available,
from various Windows® operating system
versions to UNIX® and Linux. Plus, there
is also a VMware cluster. On top of this
the company uses mainly Oracle Database
and Microsoft® SQL Server.

Benefit

Hassle-free backups, even
after acquisitions

“Our backup software has to be able to
cope with all kinds of technologies as
we tend to keep companies’ legacy IT
infrastructures running in the initial period
after we acquire them,” says Wriedt.

“HPE Data Protector has never disappointed
us in this respect. We have so far been
able to integrate everything very easily
and to quickly create audit-proof backups
of the new environments. We are very
happy with it.”

Unusual Linux derivatives and file systems
have been integrated over the years and
Wriedt also praises the backup software’s
ease of use to incorporate these more
unusual demands.

The company currently has almost 400
terabytes of data being backed up to HPE
StoreEver MSL tape libraries of various sizes,
some in Munich and others spread across 24
of its branch oices. The backups are always
triggered from the Munich headquarters.