CASE STUDY

AutoNation Leverages
Cohesity for File andObject Services withLower TCO

Founded in 1996, AutoNation (NYSE: AN) is the largest automotive retailer in theUnited States. It provides new and pre-owned vehicles, collision centers, andINDUSTRY
Retail
USE CASE
Backup and Recovery, Disaster
Recovery, Long-term Retention,
File and Object

automotive parts through AutoNation Precision Parts. Headquartered out of Fort
Lauderdale, Florida, the company currently owns and operates over 360 retail
operations throughout the U.S with more than 25,000 employees. The company
sells and repairs 35 different manufacturer brands and is ranked #145 in the 2019
Fortune 500. For fiscal year 2018, AutoNation recorded revenue of over $21B.

COHESITY SOLUTIONS

Challenges

Cloud Edition

AutoNation has a large IT environment with a primary data center in Denver, Colorado and a

SOLUTION PARTNERSAWSCHANNEL PARTNERChampion Solutions

secondary disaster recovery (DR) site in Plano, Texas. The company has over 1,300 virtual machines,
200 physical servers, and growing data of 1.2PB that supports retail operations.
Due to the company’s legacy data protection environment, the IT team at AutoNation wasexperiencing a host of issues, including up to 6,000 backup failures per month requiring a dedicatedemployee with more than 70 percent time to address constant challenges. Not all applications weresupported or protected, and existing storage appliances did not scale, which resulted in expensive
forklift upgrades. Backup and recovery costs were growing exponentially and the company neededa scalable solution for modern backup and recovery. In addition, with increased application

Key Benefits

development in AWS, AutoNation required a hybrid solution with seamless integration.
With a DR site refresh on the horizon, Adam Rasner, Vice President of Technology Operations,• Reduced overall backup
windows by 50%• Saved 60% per TB compared totraditional SAN

challenged his team to come up with a backup and recovery solution to address infrastructure issues
and reduce cost. The team began looking at available options, including hyperconverged solutions,with the following requirements:•Web-scale architecture with predictable cost model

maintenance cost by 50%•

Ability to protect, store and manage data with next-gen solution• Reduced job failure rates by•

Capabilities beyond modern backup and recovery, including file and object•Single pane of glass with hybrid, multi-cloud approach• Reduced its yearly

20x

CASE STUDY | AutoNation““Our goal was to build a highly efficient and agile IT infrastructure that quickly adapts to evolving business
requirements. By leveraging Cohesity’s software-defined platform for data management, we substantiallyenhanced our operational capabilities at AutoNation, improved reliability, and lowered our TCO. Beyond
data protection, we are extending the Cohesity solution for file and object, and long-term retention inAWS. A key benefit with a flexible and scalable platform like Cohesity was the ability to expand use cases
across our environment beyond data protection meet our evolving business requirements.”
Adam Rasner, Vice President, Technology Operations, AutoNation

Solution

production systems. Cohesity enables our business to move to theThe AutoNation IT team evaluated multiple solutions, including

forward to expanding our partnership with Cohesity and further

Cohesity, Rubrik, and Veritas. After an extensive proof-of-concept(PoC), the team selected Cohesity to be AutoNation’s next-generation,
data management platform based on performance, ease ofimplementation, and lower TCO.
It was key and critical for AutoNation and its go-forward strategy toimplement Cohesity to integrate across all environments, including
moving data from on-prem to multi-cloud and back to on-prem.

next level and differentiate ourselves from the competition. We lookleveraging innovative use cases for to drive technology efficiencies
and cost optimization across multiple lines of business.”
AutoNation reduced overall backup windows by 50 percent andimproved replication between data centers. The company also
reduced job failure rates by 20 times, transforming efficiency andfreeing up staff for other business-critical projects.

With more and more next-generation apps now developed in theFrom a single pane of glass, the IT team can back up and replicate

cloud, AutoNation will rely more heavily on cloud storage, including

VMs, applications, and data between both environments. “One of theAWS. Cohesity’s ability to support backup and recovery, as well as

most significant benefits with Cohesity is the ability to have a single

other use cases like file and object across a hybrid environment wereplatform for modern backup and recovery, failover, and disaster

instrumental. “Storing multiple terabytes of document management

recovery. Cohesity has given us flexibility to use AWS for backups

files, SQL logs, and various unstructured data under the sameolder than 40 days, as well as legacy applications that are refreshed

Cohesity UI was a natural choice for us,” Rasner said. “This was key toor refactored,“ states Rasner.

consolidation of data across our operations.”

Results
By deploying Cohesity, AutoNation not only reduced complexity andbuilt a highly-efficient backup and recovery environment, but also
lowered its TCO. With Cohesity, AutoNation saved 60 percent per
terabyte compared to traditional SAN, and has reduced its yearly
maintenance costs by 50 percent.
Rasner further explains, “Today most of our apps run on Tier 1, very
expensive, high-dollar storage and Cohesity provided a solution
to run some of our lower-tier apps at a lower cost. AutoNation has
moved multiple applications from NetApp primary storage onto
Cohesity, saving significant dollars and freeing up Tier 1 storage for

In addition, Cohesity’s ability to provide seamless integration withAWS from a single pane of glass to manage both cloud and on-prembackups was a key benefit. AutoNation can use AWS Glacier for longterm retention, offloading data from appliances to lower cost storage.
The company can also backup VMs from on-prem and spin them up
in the AWS environment for dev and test or a quick data validation.
Being able to take VM snapshots on-prem with Cohesity and bring
the VM online in the cloud, delivers what Rasner calls ‘on the fly’infrastructure capabilities. The ability to spin up AWS EC2 instancesfrom Cohesity backups creates a tremendous amount of flexibility
and efficiency for the IT team, as well as cost savings to free up
capacity on Cohesity clusters.

CASE STUDY | AutoNation

AutoNation attained the following benefits with Cohesity:•A single, easy-to-configure and manage solution, with global
dedupe and compression•

Significant CapEx cost savings, and additional OpEx savings
from improved efficiency•Ability to free up Tier 1 storage and leverage Cohesity as atarget, including seamless integration to AWS Glacier•

Scalable solution with ability to extend beyond backup andrecovery to meet needs for DR

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