PGA TOUR Superstore

The Business Challenge

PGA TOUR Superstore is a medium-size business with enterprise aspirations. The company is growing quickly, opening new stores and expanding e-commerce. To support that expansion, PGA TOUR Superstore’s small but strong IT team built a robust IT infrastructure comprised of Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), VMware and Veeam technologies that scale with the business growth trajectory.

When existing production storage impeded the company’s ability to open new stores fast and increase e-commerce, the IT team contacted CompliancePoint, its trusted partner since 2005. CompliancePoint built, hosts and helps manage PGA TOUR Superstore’s IT infrastructure.

“Performance, uptime and resource availability were PGA TOUR Superstore’s main challenges because their production storage was maxed out,” said Michael Boone, Vice President and General Manager of CompliancePoint’s IT Services Division. “In addition to increasing their storage capacity, we wanted to give them the features and functionality that would support their retail growth.”

Each time a new store opens, PGA TOUR Superstore provisions a VM to run the store’s point-of-sale (POS) system. Maxed-out production storage required the small IT team to spend valuable time clearing space before provisioning new VMs. Maxed-out production storage also slowed down VM backup and recovery. PGA TOUR Superstore is required to back up business-critical data nightly, but the IT team couldn’t meet that requirement, which increased the company’s risk of data loss.

“Maxed-out production storage extended nightly backup to an average of four days,” Boone said. “Extended backup can complicate recovery and impact the production environment. We didn’t want e-commerce customers to experience a lag during product searches and checkout.”

In 2005, CompliancePoint built and began hosting PGA TOUR Superstore’s IT infrastructure. Veeam® Backup & Replication™ was chosen as the cornerstone for 24x7 availability and disaster recovery (DR). Later, CompliancePoint recommended that PGA TOUR Superstore upgrade to Veeam Availability Suite™ to round out 24x7 availability with advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning.

“Availability is the key to PGA TOUR Superstore’s growth,” Boone said. “We mapped out their production storage requirements, and the vendor bidding began.”

The Veeam Solution

PGA TOUR Superstore and CompliancePoint cast a wide net for potential solutions. Over time, it became clear that the best solution was to replace maxed-out production storage with HPE storage solutions because they fully integrate with Veeam to deliver enterprise-level performance at a mid-level price.

“Veeam and HPE integration checked every box on our list of requirements, giving us the confidence we can provide 24x7 availability as new stores come online and e-commerce expands,” said Michael Anderson, PGA TOUR Superstore’s Director of IT. “Veeam and HPE storage not only support our company’s growth trajectory, they also deliver exponential benefits to the business. The performance gains are tremendous.”

PGA TOUR Superstore uses Veeam to back up 100 VMs (155TB) from HPE 3PAR storage snapshots to HPE StoreOnce, which decreased nightly backup jobs from four days to four hours. Not only do fast backups help the company protect all business-critical data, fast backups also enable more frequent backups to increase the number of restore points, helping to eliminate the risk of losing transactional data. Plus, Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots doesn’t impact the production environment. For PGA TOUR Superstore that means e-commerce customers don’t experience lags when they search for products online and make purchases.

Veeam backs up to HPE StoreOnce, which delivers a deduplication ratio of at least 20:1, (7.3TB of backup storage), enabling PGA TOUR Superstore to retain 180 days of backups locally for fast recovery. Before HPE StoreOnce was implemented, only 14 days of backup could be retained locally.

Anderson cited another performance gain. HPE StoreOnce has such ample capacity that the IT team can spin up as many new POS VMs as required for new store growth — in minutes. Fast provisioning, as well as fast backup and recovery to support retail growth, are particularly helpful to a small IT team. Anderson said Veeam and HPE make PGA TOUR Superstore’s IT infrastructure available for whatever the future brings.

“Whether it’s the Internet of Things or Big Data, we have an IT infrastructure that can support real-time marketing to customers online and in stores. We’re poised for future growth and looking forward to big wins.”

The Results

• Supports rapid retail growth
  Veeam integration with HPE 3PAR and HPE StoreOnce supports PGA TOUR Superstore’s retail growth through faster, more frequent backup, high-speed recovery and quick provisioning of POS VMs for new stores.
• Protects business-critical data with 96% faster backup
  PGA TOUR Superstore’s business-critical data is protected nightly via full backup. Veeam backs up from HPE 3PAR storage snapshots so fast that nightly backup decreased from four days to four hours.
• Increases backup storage retention from 14 to 180 days
  Veeam backs up 155TB (100 VMs) to HPE StoreOnce, which deduplicates data and reduces backups to 7.3TB. A dramatically smaller backup footprint lets PGA TOUR Superstore retain 180 days of backups locally for fast recovery. Prior to HPE StoreOnce, the company could only retain 14 days of backups locally.