CASE STUDY

Pilot Thomas Logistics
Reclaims 780 IT Hours
Per Year by Moving
File and Object, Backupand Cloud Archiving
to Cohesity
When oil and gas markets fluctuate, industry leaders adapt. Pilot Thomas Logistics
continues to meet customers’ industrial energy needs by doing more with less,including automating and streamlining IT. As a cost center, Pilot IT recognizes theINDUSTRY
EnergyUSE CASES
File Services, Backup andneed to add value and reduce spend, both of which it has been able to do with theweb-scale Cohesity data management platform. Since deploying Cohesity for fileshares, backup and cloud archiving, Pilot staff has regained nearly 800 hours ofRecovery, Cloud Archival

lost productivity and saved over $70,000 while achieving rapid ROI.

COHESITY SOLUTIONS

Challenges

SmartFiles, DataProtect, Helios,
Spotlight, Insight

Pilot’s aging network attached storage (NAS) product was quickly and dramatically failing. It was

TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS

full—housing 230+ shares—and initially Pilot had a dedicated IT specialist to manage the solution.

Pure, Google, VMware,

Yet as IT reorganized into more general positions, system complexity and constant alerts wereMicrosoft
CHANNEL PARTNER
SHI

overwhelming staff, creating a liability for the energy company.
When Pilot IT began searching for a new NAS solution, top requirements included lower cost, meeting
SQL performance thresholds (when used as a storage target), the ability to archive to cloud for
scalability, and little to no downtime during the migration of its production systems including SAP
that also uses the file shares as a storage target. Ease of use with a low learning curve were alsoKey Benefits

important considerations.

• Lower TCO and rapid ROI—Solution

three to nine months• 780 hours of productivity
regained• $72,000 a year in cost savings
and a significantly lower cloudarchiving investment• Entire environment backs up
in hours versus days for justone VM

After an introduction by SHI, Pilot replaced its existing NAS product with Cohesity SmartFiles.
Migration of all production file systems to Cohesity for nearly 50 terabytes of data was seamless,including about 100 SQL Servers writing to Cohesity as target storage. The process was completed inone evening with no user and very little overall system impact.
“Because of the way the old system had been architected and given that our goal was no downtime,
we needed to automate the entire migration process which Cohesity helped us to do. We had maybe
five minutes of downtime,” says Hankins.

CASE STUDY | Pilot Thomas Logistics““We had a timeline of three years to modernize file services, backup and cloud archiving, andwe completed them all within a year with Cohesity. Our total cost of ownership is less than zerofor Cohesity—in employee time as well as space and tape archiving cuts. I’ve been nothing but
happy with Cohesity.”
Michael Hankins, IT Infrastructure Manager, Pilot Thomas Logistics
By securely exposing hourly, high-performance Cohesity backup“Monitoring access to sensitive files on specific shares and quickly

snapshots via SMB for native Windows file explorer access, Pilot has

running reports is easy with Cohesity and Spotlight,” says Hankins.

enabled employees to perform self-service file recovery instantly—“I wouldn’t have had any tools to do that without Spotlight. It’s

without IT assistance. This recently allowed a team member to accessdefinitely very useful.”a project file share to recover a single deleted folder in minutes. Thiswas impossible with the older product because backups often did notcomplete before the next one was scheduled to start.
Although Pilot had only planned to upgrade NAS, the success andcost efficiency of Cohesity’s single, software-defined platform
empowered the company to also improve its backups and archiving.
Tape backups with the legacy product took a month, and if they failed,caused the company to revert to the prior month with no way torecover lost data, if needed. Moreover, the backup engineer locatedin Texas had to drive to Pilot’s data center in Oklahoma once a month
to manage the tapes. “It was a huge liability and risk,” according toHankins. “We could be spending up to 20 hours a week just managing
our backups.”
Pilot added cloud archiving for backups less than a year after
adopting Cohesity for modern file and object services. Now Pilot
stores primary application data in Pure and periodically archives fromCohesity to Google Cloud Platform, enabling IT to eliminate offsite
tape storage while enjoying scalable, cheaper and more efficientmanagement. The team expects to enable disaster recovery in thecloud through Cohesity, too.
Pilot is also taking advantage of the unique ability to run apps on theCohesity platform. It has installed two Cohesity Marketplace apps—
Spotlight and Insight—both of which mitigate risk. With Spotlight,
for example, Pilot was able to quickly generate a report of all of thefiles an employee that had recently given notice had deleted prior todeparture.

Results
Pilot has experienced rapid ROI since consolidating its data
management with Cohesity—the initial platform paying for itself inroughly six to nine months and cloud archiving in just three months.
In contrast, most data center solutions typically have an ROI of 12 to24 months.
With Cohesity SmartFiles, one IT team has reclaimed up to 10 hours
per week—no longer troubleshooting, supporting tickets andtraveling to the data center to replace failed NAS drives. A second IT
team reclaimed the nearly five hours a week it spent creating shares,
managing snapshots and manually maintaining the legacy product.
With Cohesity, Pilot has recouped nearly 780 hours of productivity ayear across these teams.
When it comes to backup and recovery there are clear benefits aswell. Before Cohesity, backing up one Exchange Server VM would
take two to three days. “Cohesity cut that time to an hour or two
for our entire environment,” says Hankins. “Peace of mind is also
a big benefit of Cohesity. It just works, and if something does
happen, I typically get an email notifying me that a support case
was opened and closed before I knew about the problem. The
support is excellent.”
Cohesity also reduced Pilot’s on-premises data center footprint aswell as energy costs by roughly $2,000 per rack per month for threeracks of the old NAS solution, for a total of $6,000 per month savings.
Moreover, archiving to Google Cloud Platform through Cohesity is
considerably more affordable than tape alternatives.

CASE STUDY | Pilot Thomas Logistics

Pilot is achieving the following benefits from Cohesity’s converged
data management platform:• Lower TCO and rapid ROI—three to nine months• 780 hours of productivity regained• $72,000 a year in cost savings and a significantly lower cloud

About Pilot Thomas Logistics
Pilot Thomas Logistics is the premier provider of fuel, lubricants andchemicals to the Energy, Marine, Mining and Industrial markets and isheadquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. PTL operates in over thirty (30)states from 100+ terminals.

archiving investment• Entire environment backs up in hours versus days for just one VM© 2020 Cohesity, Inc. All rights reserved.
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