Press release

True Alliance Slashes Backup Cost and Complexity With Cohesity and AWS

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Cohesity today announced that True Alliance, an omni-channel retail company operating across Australia and New Zealand, has reduced its backup cost and complexity with the deployment of Cohesity coupled with data storage capacity provided by the AWS Glacier service.

The deployment follows the company’s decision to better support its ongoing business growth by effectively managing around 45 terabytes of data, including customer and sales records, high-quality digital images, and video used in marketing campaigns.

“We had reached the stage where the weekend wasn’t long enough to complete a full backup of all our servers,” says Aiden Ichsan, network engineer, True Alliance. “We were finding we had to do some backups during the week and even some during the working day, which wasn’t ideal. This caused some network congestion issues and created some problems for other parts of the business.”

True Alliance had previously been relying on Veritas Backup Exec infrastructure which stored data in three IBM tape libraries. This system had been in place for around five years and was proving increasingly difficult to manage and maintain.

The company subsequently reviewed its options and sought a solution that would reduce backup times, optimise IT productivity, and increase operational efficiencies. The organisation also wanted to adopt a modern backup and recovery solution that would simplify management, slash total cost of ownership, provide seamless integration to the cloud and create a scalable platform to accommodate future data growth.

After carefully evaluating a range of options, a decision was taken to deploy a Cohesity-based solution with data storage capacity provided by the AWS Glacier service.

“With Cohesity, you have a solution that just does it all for you and that removes much of the complexity,” said Ichsan. “When you add the flexibility and reliability of Amazon Glacier, the solution becomes even more compelling.”

During what ended up being a very rapid deployment, support was provided by technology partner Agiletech. The native cloud integration capability offered by Cohesity made both the initial deployment and ongoing management very straightforward.

“Backups tend to be a massive time sink and our Cohesity solution has now dramatically cut the amount of staff time needed to manage our backup processes,” said Ichsan. “Where it used to take 10 hours a week to maintain backups, now it takes virtually no time at all.”

The True Alliance IT team has also managed to increase overall backup retention. As there is no longer a reliance on physical tapes, it’s possible to simply increase the storage capacity being used in the Amazon cloud. This capacity can quickly and easily continue to grow as needs evolve over time.

Associated costs have also been reduced as True Alliance pays significantly less for storage than what it was costing to manage tape libraries.

“We have halved our monthly backup storage costs compared with the previous tape-based solution,” said Ichsan.

A further benefit comes from the ability to initiate backups more regularly. Previously these were completed daily or weekly depending on the system, whereas now data can be backed up every four hours. This ensures all files are consistently protected and ready to be restored if required.

“For us, backup has changed from being a massive pain to something that just happens in the background,” said Ichsan. “Thanks to the combination of Cohesity and AWS, we now have in place an infrastructure that can support our current activity and grow with us in the future.”

About Cohesity


Cohesity ushers in a new era in data management that solves a critical challenge facing businesses today: mass data fragmentation. The vast majority of enterprise data — backups, archives, file shares, object stores, and data used for test/dev and analytics — sits in fragmented infrastructure silos that makes it hard to protect, expensive to manage, and difficult to analyze. Cohesity consolidates silos onto one web-scale platform, spanning on-premises, cloud, and the edge, and uniquely empowers organizations to run apps on that platform — making it easier than ever to back up and extract insights from data. Cohesity is a 2019 CNBC Disruptor and was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Visit our website and blog, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and like us on Facebook.