Backup as a Service | IT Case Study

Clarion Events (Backup as a Service)

Highly flexible and simple to implement Backup solution that solves both short and long term needs.

Clarion Events is one of the oldest independent event organisers in the UK, which has grown to include a highly successful and creative portfolio of brands along with over 500 staff and offices around the globe.

With a truly dynamic and fast paced business environment including activities in many diverse industry verticals, Clarion’s data is comprehensive as well as critical to its day to day business operations, so ensuring this key company asset is protected and available is of paramount importance.

Cultivating a productive partnership

Panoptics has cultivated a fruitful relationship with Clarion since 2012 through the provision of a range of solutions including Professional Services all the way through to full Managed Services inclusive of a significant onsite presence.

As part of the Panoptics ethos, the focus has always been on developing the relationship into a genuine partnership by ensuring our service portfolio is relevant and cost effective to allow Clarion to concentrate on their core business. This continual development and adaptation to Clarions diversifying requirements, has ensured the smooth adoption of additional services, such as BaaS, for greater business benefit.

Changing data storage needs

With continued business expansion as well as acquisitions, Clarions storage growth and reducing backup window placed extreme pressure on the existing disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) backup solution resulting in the failure of many backup jobs, therefore a new solution had to be found.

With over 20TB of data and a legacy SAN solution, upgrading the SAN to cope with the additional backup space required would be a futile exercise as it would mean spending money on a now defunct platform. Additionally, with the predicted acquisition of at least 10 businesses per annum, the right solution must have the ability to scale very quickly without significant additional upgrade activity and therefore cost.

The challenge

Clarion’s existing HP LeftHand SAN was quickly running out of support in 2016 and was only ever intended as a short term fix for rapid Storage expansion. However, Clarion were still evaluating their long term storage strategy and still needed time to ensure the right platform was selected without the short term pressure of fixing the existing backup requirement. It was therefore critical that the solution implemented had to be scalable, both in the short and long term that could grow with the business and be paid for monthly based on their usage.

The solution

Panoptics had the perfect solution to meet the requirement, providing Backup as a Service with Veeam technology.

With a simple & scalable cost structure based on per GB consumed on the Panoptics platform plus a Veeam license per server backup, the solution could be easily deployed to only the Virtual Machines required with a monthly ‘Pay as you Go’ commercial model. Additionally, confirmation of successful backups is now easier to report on and in the event of a serious failure the workloads can be promoted onto Panoptics Hosted VM platform providing a third level of protection for Clarion’s systems.

The results

Catering for just over 60% of all of Clarion’s production data, the service has now been fully operational for over 12 months and continues to provide the scalability, protection, security and ease of use that Clarion required from the outset.

Additionally, a rationalisation of global RTO and RPO requirements has been adopted quickly and easily via simple configuration changes to the service rather than a redesign of the entire backup solution. Remote locations have also been deployed with Clarion owned Veeam providing a true hybrid solution all managed by Panoptics.

The benefits

Simple, easy to consume commercials and a guaranteed working solution allowing Clarion to concentrate on their business rather than the data that underpins it.

Furthermore, the solution has provided the flexibility to scale quickly when new business acquisitions are made and the deployment supports maximum performance of the existing legacy systems in place, with the SAN environment only now holding production data.

"It’s safe to say that Panoptics are a true partner to Clarion and have become an integral part of our team. Their robust solutions and unique approach really sets them apart, which made the decision to use their Backup-as-a-Service an easy one."

CIO, Clarion Events