10 July 2014

With more than two million subscribers, LoveFilm claims to be the leading online DVD rental and streaming service in the UK and Europe. Following a series of mergers, its infrastructure needed an upgrade. In 2011, the firm was bought by Amazon and the IT team then began integrating all the disparate IT solutions.

Their first step was to virtualise and this was completed in 2012. LoveFilm now has more than a hundred virtual servers, several vSQL databases, and eight physical servers. Most of the infrastructure is based in two data centres with a disaster recovery (DR) site located at a remote site. The existing backup system had evolved with a variety of solutions but had become harder to manage and more expensive.

LoveFilm’s IT infrastructure analyst Paul Houghton says the company had already looked at a virtual system but discovered it was unable to protect the physical servers. The solution came in the shape of Unitrends’ Recovery-943 appliance and Enterprise Backup software. This created the platform LoveFilm needed to protect both its virtual and physical infrastructure.

The ’943 is said to be the industry’s first tiered storage high-density enterprise class backup appliance with 36TB drives configured in a RAID-60 to optimise redundancy and performance. Unitrends says it is specifically designed to allow parallel commit of metadata and backup streams. It was installed at LoveFilm’s primary data centre in London’s Docklands to underpin its IT environment and SAN. Enterprise Backup was deployed to a VM at the DR site in Islington, giving the company 40TB of backup capacity.

Unitrends says the system was up and running in less than four weeks despite LoveFilm expecting it to take three months to complete. It has since proven to be easy to use. On the occasions when LoveFilm has suffered issues with VMs and its SAN, the restore has been quick and simple. Unitrends says its appliances’ ability to take snapshots and protect virtual servers once a day is a valuable feature, as is the capability to backup incremental changes to the vSQL machines on an hourly basis.