Case Study: Hubei Unicom achieves 72% faster backups and millions in savings with Veritas Technologies

Reducing Backup Time by 72 Percent and Saving Millions with Veritas Data Protection Solutions

Hubei Unicom, a Wuhan‑based telecom serving about 100 million customers, was struggling to protect and quickly recover three petabytes of growing data—about 10 TB of changed data each night—using a disk‑to‑tape approach that pushed backups beyond required windows and created a bottleneck for a critical 10 TB Oracle database catalog. Slow backups and manual intervention risked service disruption and large revenue exposure.

Working with Veritas Consulting Services, Hubei Unicom deployed a custom NetBackup server (with SSD tiering and Fibre Transport) and NetBackup 5220 appliances across three data centers, moving to a disk‑to‑disk‑to‑tape strategy with source/target deduplication. Backups now run in 5 hours versus 18 (72% faster), database recoveries are ~4x faster (400 MB/s vs 120 MB/s), deduplication achieves ~85% (saving CN¥13.1M / US$2.1M in storage), plus CN¥2M (US$321K) in tape savings, reduced network load, faster one‑month deployment, and a projected 100% payback the first time the key database is recovered.

Hubei Unicom

Guan Jun

IT Manager