Troutman Sanders' Thomas manages 18 Data Domain boxes throughout the U.S. They are being used as NAS targets for Symantec Backup Exec. The Data Domain boxes have a capacity of 1TB to 15TB. But, each of Troutman Sanders' NAS boxes backs up the equivilant of 400TB to 500TB of data.

The Data Domain arrays have been in production for more than eight months. Each office does a local backup to its on-site Data Domain box. That data is replicated off-site to headquarters in Atlanta and then again replicated to the law firm's secondary site. Before Data Domain, Thomas says his company had DLT-4 tape changers and LTO-1 tape. Backups at some offices used to take more than 11 hours, but now with Data Domain, the backups are under 50 minutes. Troutman Sanders backs up one site with 163 TB of data onto 4.6TB of Data Domain for a compression ratio of 34.6:1. Smaller sites have experienced a compression ratio as high as 55:1.

"The [Data Domain] hardware was comparable to buying all-new tape hardware, but the speed and the ability to not have to manage the tape is what really got us ' the replication is an added bonus," Thomas says.

Grahame McKenzie, manager of IT at Crawford Adjusters Canada Inc. in Hamilton, Ontario, had performed local backups at each of the company's 80 remote sites. He now manages 80 remote and 20 local Asigra clients backing up to a single 2TB Asigra TeleVault. They mirror the central TeleVault to an off-site hardened data center and copy their monthly full backups off onto tape moving these off-site to another location.

McKenzie says that before, "we weren't even doing it [backups] on the smaller XP share points -- there was no backup. It just wasn't economical; if it was an NT server, it would [be] backed up to tape." This process was time-consuming and not subject to easy validation. He says that "with Asigra, backups all take place, and they all come here, ' and I get a report on everything the next day." McKenzie says that in some cases, it was difficult to quantify a return on his investment because no backups were being performed, but he did say "we don't invest in tape on our new branch servers, and we have one tape library here."