Xiaolei Han , Senior IT Manager at Gemdale , said : “ If our sales system went offline , we wouldn ’ t be able to sell our properties . These applications are so crucial to the business that even an hour of downtime could cost us the equivalent of US $ 15 million in lost sales opportunities – so it ’ s essential that we deliver 24 / 7 availability .”

Gemdale ’ s IT environment comprises approximately 500 VMware virtual machines ( VMs ) running on 15 physical servers , which host mission-critical information systems such as Microsoft Active Directory , Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange .

“ We previously used a legacy backup solution to back up our business data ,” said Han . “ We aimed to complete an incremental backup each night and a full backup every weekend . However , hitting these targets

By accelerating backup processes by 50 %, we are creating valuable headroom that will allow us to protect our business as data volumes grow .

was becoming increasingly challenging . It took up to eight hours to back up a single 1 TB VM , which meant it was difficult to complete the process on time .”

As Gemdale ’ s business – and its data volumes-grew rapidly , the company realized that the existing data

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