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LEADING AUTO RETAILER SELECTS COHESITY AND CISCO FOR BACKUP , RESTORE AND RANSOMWARE PROTECTION
Arnold Clark needed sufficient protection against ransomware attacks , and Cohesity and Cisco ’ s technology offering helped the automotive company to address this . Pat Malloy , Head of Networks and Platform Engineering , Arnold Clark , tells us how the Cohesity-Cisco solution provided the customer with a simplified , modern backup and recovery solution , which is integral in the transport industry as one of the most targeted .
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Arnold Clark has grown to be the largest , independently owned car dealership in the UK , with over 250 branches and franchises . In addition to selling and servicing cars , the business includes accident repair , parts centres , car and van rentals and fleet services . It has 9,000 staff and an annual turnover of £ 3 billion .
Challenge
As a distributed and diversified business , Arnold Clark has complex data management requirements . Its branches and business lines require immediate access to information , stateof-the-art record keeping and excellent backup and Disaster Recovery . Service interruptions can have catastrophic effects , resulting in immediate loss of revenue and reputational damage .
Responsibility for ensuring constant uptime and 100 % reliable backup , restore and Disaster Recovery falls to Pat Malloy , Head of Networks and Platform Engineering . Malloy inherited a fiveyear-old solution built on what was , at that time , a very modern infrastructure . Malloy knew the solution was cracking at the seams . It was difficult to scale and as the business had grown significantly
Arnold Clark was already using Cisco infrastructure , such as Cisco Unified Computing System ( UCS ) and Cisco Intersight , which made the implementation familiar and easier on one unified , programmable architecture . since its deployment , the solution was reaching its limitations . Some of the pressing problems were : backup windows were not quick enough to ingest all data , separate backup and replication jobs were required for Disaster Recovery and low capacity efficiency was resulting in high cost , while storage limitations made it impossible to create data archives . In addition , critical SQL workloads were not adequately being backed up and archiving tapes offsite was both expensive and arduous , making data recovery time-consuming and costly .
Solution
When the company was ready to proceed , Malloy approached Cohesity with the primary goal of replacing the legacy backup solution . He evaluated three vendors , but only took Cohesity through to the Proof of Concept ( PoC ). He was particularly attracted to the way Cohesity and Cisco were partnering to offer a flexible and comprehensive solution that is backed by Cisco Validated Designs ( CVDs ), and within that , Cisco HyperFlex was a huge draw .
Moving to a hyperconverged model would be a complete architectural
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