Craig Wuerzberger, Sub-Zero Group, with Dave Vellante and Steve Kenniston at EMC World 2014 @thecube #emcworld According to theCUBE host Dave Vellante, EMC World this year has attracted a big crowd of over 12,000 people. He was co-hosting together with Steve Kennistonn for the annual show in Las Vegas, welcoming Craig Wuerzberger, a Systems Engineer at Sub-Zero. “Tell us a bit about Sub-Zero, what your role is there?” asked Vellante. “Well, Sub-Zero is obviously a manufacturer of a very high-end of both cooking and refrigeration appliances. Been around since the 1940’s and we actually brought in the Wolf appliance and the cooking line the year 2000. My role there is a Systems Engineer. So, I am basically in charge of everything involving server, storage, backup, data protection. Been there for 14 years now. So, I have got my feel pretty wet in that area,” replied Wuerzberger. Asked to describe the revolution of Sub-Zero’s IT environment, this was his take: “It’s actually pretty large. Originally the size of the entire IT department was about eight people. We now have a staff of about 40. I think we are at about 45 now — that includes not only the systems and network people, but also our application development and our IBM-i area,” responded Wuerzberger. “What are the big systems or applications that you are running?” continued Vellante. “We are a Microsoft shops so we run a lot of SQL, we run Microsoft Exchange… we do our ERP system is a Systems i or an IBM-i. So, we are running that Infor XA to do our ERP and our item inventory,” Wuerzberger said. “About five years ago we were running just a Symantec netbackup environment running on an SL-500 tape library 150 tape capacity,” Wuerzberger went on. “In fact, at that time however, with the increasing storage and the increasing things that we had added to the systems over the years, it suddenly went from adequate to completely inadequate in a matter of a few years probably. So, we ended up getting into a situation where our backup system was not able to handle what our current load was as far as data protection and we had to come up with a solution to find a way to fix it,” obliged Wuerzberger when asked to talk about how the Data Protection has evolved. The virtues + vices of virtualization . “Talk about virtualization at the time. What was the virtualization strategy, how fast were you virtualizing?” quizzed Vellante. Craig commented by saying the following; “We implemented virtualization… in 2008, and it went from one or two systems to… 75 percent virtualized in a year-and-a-half. The ROI in our virtualization project we hit it in less than three months. So, it was huge flip. We had a whole bunch of servers that were ready to just die, and we just flip them all over.” “That rapid pace of virtualization must have put even more stress in your backup environment,” commented Vellante. “It did. Absolutely it did because now from our point of view we didn’t really have a virtual backup strategy. It was more of a physical turned virtual. We had treated them as if they were physical services,” pondered Wuerzberger. When asked about the whole process when they brought in Avamar and Data Domain, Wuerzberger said, “We brought in Avamar in March of 2012 and it was probably one of the most successful implementations that we have done probably right up with VMware. The system was brought in-house in February, it was brought up on March and by the end of March we were in full production, full backups and I was already starting to turn down our net backup solution.”