Working closely with long-term strategic partner, Rubrik, we provided a highly successful video game developer with a cloud storage solution that enabled their team to finally take control of their backups.
Splash Damage is an award-winning British video games developer that specialises in multi-player, first-person shooter games. Despite the studio’s success, however, the team was operating a legacy backup product on infrastructure that required a large investment to refresh, as it was fast approaching end of life.
The Challenge
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Reduce on premises storage legacy spend
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Consolidate existing backup technology
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Easy and cost efficient scalability
As things stood, backups were configured to utilise a mixed storage estate, which was fragmenting the protection strategy and making restore operations difficult. What’s more, the backup software was cumbersome, meaning a full-time employee was required to manage and maintain it. With a 5% year-on-year growth, enabling backup to the cloud was seen as essential for long-term retention of data and to minimise risk. Splash Damage IT Manager, Craig Nelson, commented: “We challenged Softcat to recommend a modern backup solution that could leverage cloud storage for the evolving requirements of the studio”. In short, Splash Damage needed a new backup and recovery solution for 50+ terabytes of Windows file server and AWS data with full data visibility and accessibility.
The Solution
Although backup and restore forms a critical part of any IT teams day-to-day responsibilities, Rubrik’s search engine-like interface makes backups and restore activities straightforward, freeing up the Splash Damage team to concentrate on higher value tasks. Craig Nelson said: “Rubrik has a very easy to use search capability enabling quick restores, so we were really impressed. Added to that is the ability to leverage AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) as a tier for backups giving us the cloud storage scalability we need to match our growth requirements”.
The Results
- We helped Splash Damage save £270k on backup over a 3-year period
- This represented a 55% saving compared to upgrading the existing environment
- The AWS tier that leverages S3 provided a long-term retention capability
- Future costs and disruption were avoided with less physical hardware
- The solution also requires less power and cooling overheads
“We worked with Softcat and Rubrik to calculate a TCO of the Rubrik solution against doing a refresh of the existing backup technology and it soon became clear that we would save £270k over a 3-year period.”
