GoDaddy Cuts Storage Costs and Improves the Customer Experience with Data Domain

We caught up with Thomas Costello, GoDaddy’s senior manager for Enterprise Storage, at EMC World in May and got to hear about his very successful first year at the company, which he attributes in part to EMC® Data Domain®.

When Costello arrived at GoDaddy, the domain name registrar and web hosting company, he was put in charge of all things storage-related and given two immediate tasks: 1) reduce storage costs, and 2) improve the customer experience by more quickly restoring data that users accidently delete. By bringing in a Data Domain protection storage system, he accomplished both before he’d been there a year!

But let’s back up. You’ve no doubt heard of GoDaddy, but did you know that the company has more than 62 million domain names under management and 14 million customers with web sites?
web-design

It was the cost of storing those 14 million customers’ web site data that Costello was asked to get under control. That was no mean feat, since there was both primary and protection data to manage. When Costello arrived, in addition to having tape backup systems in all of its data centers, GoDaddy had another 40,000 tapes stored off-site; amounting to some 38 PB of backup data in total.

Costello’s first step was to understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the tape backup operations and he soon found that it was more than anyone had realized. He then contrasted this against the TCO of disk-based backup solutions from a shortlist of vendors. “By far the lowest cost, not just per gigabyte but total cost for the operations of those devices, was Data Domain,” he says. “It was significant, a clear winner on total cost of ownership.”

Costello estimates that the TCO for Data Domain is 66 percent cheaper than the company’s spending on tape. GoDaddy now has 60 percent of its backup data on Data Domain and Costello plans to increase that to 90 percent by the end of next year.

And his second task – reducing restore times? They’re now down to just three-to-four hours since no human interaction or tape recall is required. This is a significant improvement, and a huge relief for the typical GoDaddy customer whose small business depends on its GoDaddy web site.

You can find out more about Costello’s work at GoDaddy here.

About the Author: Caitlin Mahoney