Customer Success Story

LOVEFiLM Casts Unitrends for Backup Role CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: It’s All About the Performance

Interview with Paul Houghton, IT Infrastructure Analyst, and Gregg Braden, Head of IT, LOVEFiLM

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Solution Highlights Customer Profile Industry LOVEFiLM is a UK-based provider of DVD by post and on demand streaming in the • Entertainment, Retail UK and . It is an .com subsidiary. Protected Platforms: • Windows Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, LOVEFiLM has become the leading online DVD rental and streaming service in the UK and across Europe. It has • Microsoft Exchange more than 2 million subscribers and offers over 70,000 titles to rent by post plus • vSQL thousands of movies and TV series to watch instantly. Data Protected • 40 TBs Challenges Challenges: • Rapidly growing license Several acquisitions had left LOVEFiLM with an infrastructure to improve upon. costs from previous Following its purchase by Amazon in 2011, the company went through an incumbent provider and integration process. Paul Houghton, IT Infrastructure Analyst at LOVEFiLM and a mish mash of disparate Gregg Braden, Head of IT, were charged with managing the process and given a solutions brief to tidy up the disparate solutions at the company. • LOVEFiLM was looking for LOVEFiLM’s first step to modernise the infrastructure was to virtualise, which was simplicity and reliability across its different completed in 2012. environ¬ments LOVEFiLM now has over a hundred virtual servers, several vSQL databases and Solution 8 physical servers. Most of the infrastructure is based in two data centres with a • Unitrends Recovery-943 disaster recovery (DR) site based at a remote location. • Unitrends Enterprise The existing back up systems had evolved with a variety of solutions but it was BackupTM software becoming harder to manage, the licensing was very confusing and getting more Benefits expensive and it was also becoming a complete headache for the company. • Easy to install Looking for something to simplify and improve LOVEFiLM’s backup strategy, Paul • Easy to use Houghton found Unitrends and began to research the product. At first sight, it • Backup for virtual and appeared easy to use and enjoyed good support. Most importantly, it had a good physical environments reputation for integration with virtualisation software. Paul Houghton describes this as “a big bonus. Lots of providers say they do this but it’s not true”. The company had already looked at a virtual solution but discovered it was unable to protect LOVEFiLM’s physical servers. “We needed a solution that could protect both our physical and virtual environments,” Houghton says.

Benefits Easy to use and install LOVEFiLM opted for a Unitrends Recovery-943 appliance and its Unitrends Enterprise Backup software. The Recovery-943 is the industry’s first tiered storage high-density enterprise class backup appliance with 36TB drives configured in a RAID-60 to optimise redundancy and performance. It is specifically designed to allow parallel commit of metadata and backup streams. The Unitrends Enterprise Backup software is a software-only virtual appliance that can protect virtual and physical infrastructure. The Recovery-943 is installed at the primary data centre in the Docklands to underpin the company’s IT environment and its SAN (storage area network). The Unitrends Enterprise Backup software appliance is on a virtual machine at the DR site in Islington. The company has 40TB of backup capacity.

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“We’ve worked with lots of The products were installed in hours and the system was up and running in less suppliers that promise the than a month despite LOVEFiLM expecting it to take three months to complete. “It earth, Unitrends has actually was all so easy,” Houghton says. “And it does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s an delivered.” easy to use, great backup system.” – Gregg Braden, LOVEFiLM Working in a virtualised environment As promised, the Unitrends solution works very well with LOVEFiLM’s virtualised environment. It has proven to be easy to use, cost effective and easy to restore from. On those occasions when LOVEFiLM has suffered issues with VMS and its SAN, the restore has been quick and easy. The ability to take snapshots and protect virtual servers once a day is a valuable feature in the Unitrends solution, as is the capability to backup incremental changes to the vSQL machines on an hourly basis. Unitrends also provides daily incremental backups for the physical servers. Braden is very impressed with what Unitrends has done for LOVEFiLM. “We’ve worked with lots of suppliers that promise the earth, Unitrends has actually delivered,” he says. “It was all so easy. And it does exactly what it says on the tin. Unitrends is an easy About Unitrends to use, great backup system.” Unitrends provides physical, virtual and cloud-based protection and recovery for – Paul Houghton, every organization’s most valuable assets: its data and applications. Supported by a LOVEFiLM “crazy-committed” customer service model based on engagement, experience and excellence, the company consistently achieves a 98 percent customer satisfaction rating and lets everyone play IT safe by delivering the best cost-to-value ratio in the data protection and disaster recovery industry. Visit www.unitrends.com.

About Unitrends Unitrends delivers award-winning business recovery solutions for any IT environment. The company’s portfolio of virtual, physical and cloud solu- Live Demo: tions provides adaptive protection for organizations globally. To address the complexities facing today’s modern data center, Unitrends delivers Watch us crash a server end-to-end protection and instant recovery of all virtual and physical as- and recover it. sets as well as automated disaster recovery testing built for virtualization. With the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership, Unitrends’ offerings unitrends.com/demo are backed by a customer support team that consistently achieves a 98 percent satisfaction rating. Visit www.unitrends.com.

Love Film PART # SB-5022-ENG-A 200 Wheeler Road, Burlington, MA 01803 www.unitrends.com