The San Francisco Giants saved more than $15,000 per year and cut backup time by 50 percent after deploying Cohesity’s data backup and recovery products.

The Major League Baseball team had recently upgraded its primary storage systems to accommodate about 125 terabytes of data that included video, publications, photos, and archives.

“Data is growing. It’s coming from everywhere and the bulk of our data is analytics and video,” said David Woolley, senior director for network operations for the San Francisco Giants. Baseball teams now use player development videos, statistics trackers, and other data from Major League Baseball systems, he said. Additionally, video is moving from low-resolution to high-resolution. “Data has completely spiked over the last five years in terms of the amount of data you can ingest, process, and use to evaluate,” Woolley said. “And that seems to be doubling every year.”

The team has to backup all of this data and that’s where Cohesity comes in. In addition to updating its primary storage systems, the Giant’s wanted to upgrade its antiquated backup platform as well, Woolley said. The team was using Veeam and Symantec Backup Exec to back up to a Data Domain appliance. This replicated their data to an off-site colocation [colo] facility. “We wanted to consolidate to one platform,” Woolley said. “Also we wanted to eliminate the colo and the cost of the colo.”

In fact, the cost savings are primarily a result of eliminating co-location and reducing maintenance and service costs.

As it looked for a secondary storage platform, the IT team also wanted to utilize cloud storage to further reduce costs. “We were looking for a platform that seamlessly integrated with the cloud, wasn’t overly complex, and had a similar backup recovery job-based platform that we were used to,” Woolley said, adding that simplicity was key.

“We’re not a huge IT shop,” he said. “We can’t have things that are overly complex, especially when it comes to backend IT processes and systems. I’m always looking for simple solutions like Cohesity.”

Working with system integrator Groupware Technology, the IT team considered Rubrik and Cohesity before moving forward with a Cohesity proof of concept (PoC) in late 2017. Compared to Rubrik, “Cohesity was ahead of the game in regards to feature set,” Woolley said. “Everything went so well that we went from PoC to production. Normally we would do a formal, several-month assessment. But this rolled right into 'this is working great, it seems to be exactly what we want, let’s light it up.'”

The Giants deployed Cohesity's DataPlatform and DataProtect software with C2300 hyperconverged nodes. The team also uses Cohesity’s native integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reduce long-term storage costs and archive its cold storage with Amazon Glacier.

It also plans to use Cohesity’s SQL clone and copy attach feature to simplify test/dev operations. This will give developers immediate access to the database snapshots, Woolley said.

Cohesity’s technology will allow the team to evolve as technology — and storage needs — evolve, Woolley said. And, he added, it’s simple. “I love simple, especially for backend IT," Woolley said. "If you have too much complexity for your backend IT then your business suffers. Keep it simple.”