2014 StorageCraft. All rights reserved. UK CASE STUDY: Network Integrity Services IT

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1 1 UK CASE STUDY: Network Integrity Services IT

2 How long before your business closes down following a disaster? Network Integrity Services spoke to StoraegCraft technology about their experience using StorageCraft technology to provide backup and recovery solutions tto their clients. How long before your business closes down following a disaster? Let s just think about that for a second. What is your business? Believe it or not it s your data. Lose your data, compromise taking data off-site or even its integrity and you might as well call it a day in the event of a disaster. To start with, how much and who will you invoice, without access to your debtors who will you chase for payment, pretty soon these issues alone can become your worst nightmare. Many businesses continue to trade with little thought to the implications of losing their data. Ask any business owner when was the last time you restored your data backup and checked its integrity or invoked your disaster process and wait for the jaw dropping vacant look. As a prolific innovator of infrastructure solutions to the Merchant and wider Distribution market place NIS is all too familiar with news of fires in the Timber Yard, flat roofs collapsing following a period of heavy rain, even server theft. But it won t happen to you right? Think again because it doesn t have to be a disaster at your business premises, consider the 2005 Buncefield Oil depot fire in Hemel Hempstead, the largest in Europe since World War II. Many businesses surrounding the Hemel Hempstead depot couldn t gain access to their premises. 2

3 What was important to you when choosing a backup solution? Why did you choose StorageCraft for its scalability? Bernie Ledwick, Technical Director at Network Integrity Services comments With so many backup solutions in the market place it is easy to think they all do the same job. If we analyse customers business needs in more detail it soon becomes clear that no two customers will have the same needs or starting positions. However, both would prefer the same robust solution to cater for their evolution. Our customers come in all sizes, from smaller departmental systems to companies with more challenging needs with hundreds of Users and many branches, add to this mix companies that plan for strong growth. Then consider the fact that modern applications continue to evolve and store increasing amounts of data with each new software upgrade. Accordingly, it is important to ensure that whatever the size of business the foundations of any data backup and disaster planning solution are scalable, fast retrieval is available at the lowest level such as recovering an . The three key phases of any backup solution are initially to be able to reliably backup locally, secondly to ensure the same data can be securely streamed off-site in short time spans covering minutes and finally one needs to invoke rapid recovery in the event of a disaster. Ultimately, this means being able to replicate the customers live environment in real time at an off-site location or data centre facility. Unfortunately, many leading edge data backup solutions are unable to cope with this level of scalability whilst offering a cost-effective solution to both the smaller and larger end of the SME market. A surprising number fall short of the mark with companies having to invest in multiple solutions or start again with a new solution each time their needs change. Clearly this is not ideal for any business, a disjointed platform also facilitates the need for training in different products, investment in multiple software licences and several levels of on-going upgrade costs. Also, the overall solution needs to have a small footprint on bandwidth utilisation without compromising key application performance. This means that it must be able to manage small amounts of data so that only the changes to the data are sent off-site. With fist-hand experience of providing Technical solutions to support leading edge applications such as bistrack, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage and others, NIS continues to take a long term view in the provision of scalable backup solutions to the Merchant and wider Distribution market places. Following much research NIS has spent a considerable amount of time perfecting their data backup and disaster recovery solutions offering live replication of systems to address the challenges of a changing world. We needed a system that allowed our clients to restore individual files quickly and easily as well as provide a server image based solution that could provide full disaster recovery" 3

4 How have you used StorageCraft in the past for a client s backup and restore? Protective Packaging Limited (PPL) required several Windows servers to be backed up continuously 24/7. NIS configured a solution to automatically stream PPL s data off-site every 15 minutes to the NIS Cloud location. Almost a year later PPL s worst nightmare became a reality as they faced total Domain server failure. Andrew Thompson PPL s IT Manager comments We operate a mission critical environment. It doesn t matter how often one invokes procedures to restore backups, one cannot always plan for issues due to the particular incident. NIS explained that we were faced with a bare metal restore. Potentially this meant days of work recreating our Windows server environment and reloading our large remote data store. When the unexpected happens for real, our business expects far more reassurance than just the writing on the box. I was blown away to learn that NIS used StorageCraft s restore utilities to seamlessly handle all the Software Driver downloads on the new server. This just left the challenge of restoring our large data store. Fortunately, NIS where able to use StorageCraft s ShadowProtect VirtualBoot utility to load an image of the Domain Controller. This allowed our Users full Domain access including authentication whilst the rest of the restore process continued. The whole approach had minimal impact on our business and our heartfelt thanks goes out to the NIS Technicians. I was blown away to learn that NIS used StorageCraft s restore utilities to seamlessly handle all the Software Driver downloads on the new server." 4

5 PMr Ledwick comments The restore process was made more challenging as we discovered that the server backup had developed an Operating System fault at some point. This prevented it from re-booting correctly. The ShadowProtect VirtualBoot facility allowed us to step back through several backups and quickly resolve this problem. StorageCraft continues to play a central role in the provision of our backup solutions as data storage laws evolve and insurers take a closer look at reliability and security of data stores. More importantly, as an accredited solutions provider direct support from StorageCraft in the quick resolution of queries was a key consideration in our search for the right partner. StorageCraft continues to play a central role in the provision of our backup solutions as data storage laws evolve and insurers take a closer look at reliability and security of data stores." 4

6 ABOUT NETWORK INTEGRITY SERVICES Network Integrity Services (NIS) provides Microsoft Windows and IBM Unix computer services throughout the UK from it's offices in Manchester, Leicester and Hatfield. We act as a single point of contact in order to deliver technology led solutions for your business needs. Our team of consultants offer a wealth of business experience and technical expertise. Our backup solutions are designed to ensure flexibility as business needs change. This ensures a single backup application that offers all the basic needs such as fast retrieval of single mailboxes, bare metal restore through to off-site replication of a live system environment inclusive of application software such Financial and Order Processing Systems. Copyright 2014 StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All rights reserved. This publication is for informational purposes only. STORAGECRAFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, IN THIS PUBLICATION. StorageCraft, ShadowProtect, ShadowControl, intelligentftp, ShadowStream, ShadowCloud, and HeadStart Restore names and logos are registered trademarks and ImageReady, CMD, VirtualBoot, Hardware Independent Restore, Recover-Ability, ImageManager, and Cloud Services names and logos are trademarks of StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. 7

7 ABOUT STORAGECRAFT At StorageCraft Technology, the goal of complete disaster recovery drives everything we do. Our StorageCraft Recover-Ability solution is an end-to-end, best-in-class backup and disaster recovery solution that is both fast and reliable. STORAGECRAFT RECOVER-ABILITY It starts with a good backup. Our award-winning StorageCraft ShadowProtect takes complete, pristine images of your machines, including all your operating systems, applications, services, and settings. It then records changes at the sector level, so you always have an up-to-date copy of every machine in your IT environment, whether it s a critical server or an employee laptop, physical or virtual. We even work with specialized database servers, like SQL, SharePoint, or Exchange. You can get granular recovery in Exchange with ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange. You have complete control over the frequency of your backups and you can set rules for consolidation and retention to manage your precious storage space using StorageCraft ImageManager. Plus, with StorageCraft ShadowControl CMD you can monitor the machines in your backup environment from a single interface and get alerts when a machine is running out of space, when a backup doesn t happen, or when any of a variety of conditions you specify is met. We also give you tools to test your backups using StorageCraft VirtualBoot and StorageCraft Image- Ready technologies, which gives you confidence that your data is safe and that a disaster won t shut you down or hold you up. If a disaster occurs, you can launch your backups as virtual machines with VirtualBoot or mount them as drives for complete, granular access to your data. Or you can pre-stage the recovery of a backup image in a virtual machine with our patented StorageCraft HeadStart Restore technology, so if your main server blows up, you can be up and running in minutes. You can even virtualize your data in the cloud so even Mother Nature can t keep you down. CONTACT US StorageCraft Technology Tellengana House, Blackrock Rd, Cork, Ireland. Phone: (UK) contactus@eu.storagecraft.com Then, you can rebuild your infrastructure and recover to all kinds of machines, physical or virtual, using our StorageCraft Hardware Independent Restore technology or ShadowProtect IT Edition. You can t be sure what kind of disaster will strike you next, but with the StorageCraft Recover-Ability solution, you can be sure it doesn t matter. You ll be just fine. Copyright 2014 StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All rights reserved. This publication is for informational purposes only. STORAGECRAFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, IN THIS PUBLICATION. StorageCraft, ShadowProtect, ShadowControl, intelligentftp, ShadowStream, ShadowCloud, and HeadStart Restore names and logos are registered trademarks and ImageReady, CMD, VirtualBoot, Hardware Independent Restore, Recover-Ability, ImageManager, and Cloud Services names and logos are trademarks of StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. 7