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Scout Labs, a growing San Francisco‐based startup, uncovers the customer conversations that often go unnoticed in blogs, social networks, tweets and message boards and turns them into insight companies can use to improve their services and products. Companies like Netflix, StubHub, and Coca‐Cola use Scout Labs’ monitoring and analysis engine to help them gauge the public's perception of their brand. As with most tech startups, Scout Labs is growing fast, both in production and customer data. The more the data grows the more valuable it becomes.

Every growing company reaches a point where their initial backup solution no longer meets their needs. Scout Labs wanted to update their process to accommodate terabytes of data, the need for faster backup, off‐site storage and faster restores. It’s hard to know exactly when that time is when you’re in the middle of a growth cycle, and for Scout Labs it wasn’t until director of operations, Steve Green, approached CTO, Jochen Frey, about the risky situation they were getting themselves into. "Every startup I’ve worked at had a need for backup but didn't invest in it and paid the price for it. I didn't want the same thing to happen to Scout Labs," says Steve Green.

Scout Labs saw several challenges to address with this upgrade, including:

• Rapidly growing data and associated storage costs
• No secondary site or team to manage it
• Low confidence in the ability to recover
• Utilize existing bandwidth for off‐site replication
• Data security required
• Shorter recovery time objective (RTO) to meet customer "always on" demands
• The need to back up all data — as they had previously only backed up the most critical data, leaving the company exposed to permanent data loss

Steve and Jochen worked to find the perfect solution to address their challenges. Their search for an off‐site backup provider led them to test out Amazon S3. When they began replicating their backup data to Amazon’s cloud they quickly realized that throughput was an issue and in the event of a disaster, it would take over a month to recover all of their data. Amazon S3 also doesn’t offer verification that the data reaches its intended destination, or more importantly, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) guaranteeing data recovery.

With this, they went back to the drawing board. As they explored options, Steve learned that Data Domain's deduplication technology could effectively reign in their growing storage costs and reduce the data sets to small enough chunks to replicate online using their existing bandwidth. Combining Data Domain’s technology with Simply Continuous' Data Recovery Vault, Scout Labs is able to securely store their data off‐site and monitor the data transmission through a convenient online portal.

"I especially liked the fact that Simply Continuous worked with enterprise‐class technology leaders like Data Domain, and the fact that I didn't have to change my backup software or processes made installation easy," says Steve Green. When comparing it with Amazon S3 Steve continued by saying, "We could upload our data to the cloud but there’s no guarantee that we would get it back. Data Recovery Vault’s recovery SLA made Simply Continuous the obvious choice."

Scout Labs backs up 1TB of data nightly to a Data Domain DD510‐15 which they own and operate. The on‐site appliance then securely replicates the backup data to a sister Data Domain appliance managed by Simply Continuous in their datacenter in Phoenix, Arizona. In the event of a recovery, Scout Labs resorts first to its on‐site appliance to restore the missing data. If the on‐site appliance is inoperable or some data is corrupted, Scout Labs recovers data from the off‐site appliance either by accessing and downloading critical data from the Simply Continuous portal, replicating data back from Simply Continuous to the on‐site appliance or ordering a replacement appliance fullyloaded with their latest copy of backup data and having it shipped to their designated recovery location.

"With Simply Continuous' help we architected the Data Domain on‐site appliance to give privileges so that anybody can view the backup data and grab whatever they need," says Steve Green. "This makes recovery quick and seamless and without a lot of IT intervention. We could have never done this if we decided to go with tape or Amazon S3."

In addition to improving recovery time, Scout Labs saves time on backup administration by dedicating only an hour a week to the backup process. "We're a forward looking company," says Jochen Frey. "Investing in modern technology like disk‐based backup and relying on a managed service provider like Simply Continuous frees up time to focus on our core business. In the end we live and die by our data so it would be stupid to not protect our assets.”

• 1TB of data
• Primary datacenter located in California

• Technology

• Rapidly growing data and storage costs
• Utilize existing network bandwidth
• Slow recovery time
• Limited budget
• No secondary datacenter or team to manage it

• DD510‐15 for on‐site appliance
• Simply Continuous Data Recovery Vault

• Improved recovery time
• Reliable and flexible data recovery options
• Well defined TCO
• 24x7 customer support
• Guaranteed data recovery backed by an SLA