AspenTech modernises global data backup and recovery strategy

AspenTech is a software supplier that optimises asset performance in complex, industrial environments with software and insights that run assets faster, safer, longer, and greener.

Its integrated solutions for capital-intensive industries supposedly optimise assets across the design, operations, and maintenance lifecycle, which automates knowledge work and builds a sustainable competitive advantage.

Migrating backups from AspenTech's Quantum tape libraries and Dell EMC NetWorker to ExaGrid and Veeam has supposedly resulted in improvements in its backup and recovery environment, including:

• A reduction in backup storage and related costs.
• A shortened backup window (eg, down from 24 hours to 1 hour).
• Fast and easy VM recoveries and data restores, improving IT's user response time.

The introduction of data deduplication to AspenTech's environment supposedly maximised backup storage by reducing its data footprint.

AspenTech principal systems administrator Richard Copithorne says, "Deduplication has saved us from what used to cause a lot of headaches.

"When I look at our environment, just at our headquarters alone, we are getting terrific deduplication, which saves us significant money on disk, and we don't worry about running out of storage anytime soon.

Changing backup solutions has also had a significant impact on AspenTech's nightly backup jobs.

In addition to data reduction and improved backup windows, data restoration became a quick and efficient process.

According to Copithorne, one of the more significant advantages of using ExaGrid with Veeam is the ability to start-up a VM almost immediately with just a few clicks, and doing an instant VM restore or creating a clone copy is "amazingly easy."

Single file restores from a tape that previously took up to an hour now take ten minutes, enabling IT to be more responsive to user requests.

Like most other organisations still using tape libraries, AspenTech's IT staff found the backup and restore/recovery process to be highly time-consuming, taking them away from other important IT initiatives.