Fenner Dunlop factory
Fenner Dunlop gained 91 days of added productivity by moving from its legacy, tape-based backup and disaster recovery solution to the cloud.
The manufacturer of conveyor belting for mining and industrial applications adopted Rubrik's platform to reduce the time its tech team spent on managing backups from 15 hours a week to only minutes.
The previous system was "extremely unreliable" and the IT team was never sure if backups would take four hours or if they would work at all.
"Because of this, we were spending 15 hours per week just managing the system. It was important to us to find a solution that would reduce the man hours maintaining backups and allow us to move off tape," said Sammy Jammal, national IT manager, Fenner Dunlop Australia.
The 91 days of added productivity are a combination of those 15 hours per week saved and additional jobs and activities pertaining to the management of the company's backup infrastructure.
“As a company, everything we do is supported by information systems—manufacturing, technical support, installation, maintenance, diagnostics services, you name it,” said Jammal.
“If the system is down for even 10 minutes, the whole operation would come to a halt. This not only has financial implications but is detrimental to our brand reputation and diminishes our customers’ confidence. As an IT team, we want to leverage technology that can help optimise our processes, allowing us to focus on enabling our users and thereby benefiting our customers,” he said.
The previous weekly backups strategy, which could take up the entire weekend, are now completed in minutes with "incremental-forever backups".
Recovering files is also instantaneous now due to Rubrik's "Google-like real-time search capability" that makes locating files easier.
The move took place in late 2018 and since then Jammal said that the team no longer logs into or touches any backups systems, even when there is a firmware update, as Rubrik has managed this without failure.
"By switching to Rubrik, we have reduced costs by eliminating tape, support licenses, and archiving to public cloud. Moving to the cloud was not possible with our previous solution. Rubrik’s native integration with Azure allows us to maximise our storage efficiency as we scale our cloud footprint. We were also able to migrate off tape, eliminating unnecessary overhead and leading to immediate hard savings.”
Most of Fenner Dunlop's workforce works remotely, with some who work at customer sites never visiting an office, which increases the need for the business to be mobile.
Jammal said that moving to the cloud is a priority as Fenner Dunlop wants to empower users to "self-serve wherever they are".
“Rubrik was our steppingstone into the cloud; it allowed us to leverage Microsoft Azure for long-term retention. We are now much more confident knowing that it only takes a few clicks to restore and support our users without geographic restrictions."
Headquartered in Melbourne, Fenner Dunlop has been in business for more than 100 years and was acquired in 2018 by French tire manufacturer Michelin. I employs 900 people across 30 sites in Australia.
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