CPLQ's head office at New Farm, Brisbane, ran Symantec Backup Exec 12 software to support an autoloader tape drive; backup and recovery processes were sporadic.
Steven Cantle, Senior Network engineer, stated that if the New Farm head office servers had crashed or suffered a major disaster, it could have taken weeks to reinstall servers and restore data from tape. To eliminate this possibility, he introduced ShadowProtect Server Edition disk-based backup and disaster recovery software from StorageCraft, which performs incremental backups every 15 minutes.
“That represents a huge benefit since it means that now we can only ever lose 15 minutes worth of work,” said Steven.
When the DR program is complete, more than 30 additional servers at CPLQ satellite offices throughout Queensland will run ShadowProtect Server and link to the ShadowProtect server at head office via a private network. In this way, work at remote offices will also be backed up every 15 minutes, and sent to head office.
CPLQ runs Microsoft's 2008 Hyper-V virtualised environment on a high end business grade server, which will be key to the next phase of the organisation's DR plan. When implemented, it will replicate all ShadowProtect images to an external data centre.
“If head office should burn to the ground, up-to-date work and information will be available at the data centre, and we will be able to remote into the MS 2008 Hyper-V environment to access everything,” Steven Cantle, Senior Network Engineer - Cerebral Palsy League of Queensland
“Easy to install, easy to manage, easy to use and compared to other products - it works!” John Koch, Network & Communications Analyst
The IT team at Great Lakes Council, in NSW, breathed a collective sigh of relief recently when their fallback backup system restored the drive in a crashed server within three minutes.
“Using StorageCraft ShadowProtect, we had the server up and running within three minutes, restored to the exact state of our last ShadowProtect backup - which was absolutely amazing, I hate to think what would have happened otherwise - the server rebuild would probably have taken up to two days. We saved a great deal of downtime and potential user problems.” Gerry Locke - IT Manager, Great Lakes City Council
“I first saw ShadowProtect 12 months ago and I was impressed with the ease of installation and configuration, as well as its affordability. More importantly the simplicity ShadowProtect brings to data recovery, including bare metal restore, making it a disruptive technology that Microsoft centric organisations must consider. With version 3.0, StorageCraft have made a great product even more compelling.” Dr. Kevin McIsaac - Advisor for Intelligent Business Research Service (IBRS).
“ShadowProtect has allowed us to dramatically streamline our backup and recovery procedures, saving us time while providing a higher level of service to our end users. If someone creates a file at 10am and deletes it at 10:30am, we can recover it in minutes. The HIR capability also makes short work of hardware migrations and P2V. ShadowProtect has become an indispensable part of our IT infrastructure.” Robert Wilkinson - Systems Support Specialist, Ku-ring-gai Council
Sasha Sutarov, Team Leader Network Infrastructure at Leichhardt Municipal Council in Sydney, has used ShadowProtect for three years. At present the data loss window is four hours, due to storage constraints. But soon-to-be implemented virtualisation technology and additional storage capacity will allow IT staff to reduce the maximum data loss to within one hour.
Sasha says: “During my time here we have had only one real drama. A server with a RAID configuration crashed when a contractor was working on it – two hard drives went down within hours. Using ShadowProtect we were able to restore the server image data overnight after we had replaced the faulty drives. Next morning everything was back online and staff were able to continue where they left off the previous day. Although that was our only serious crash, we have to restore individual files about once or twice a week. This is where we see the true benefits of ShadowProtect, in being able to restore files within minutes without chasing out tapes.”
Before migrating to ShadowProtect, Council used backup-to-tape technology from various vendors for day-to-day backup, a procedure which Sasha considers to be more suitable for archival backup these days. Sasha Sutarov - Team Leader Network Infrastructure, Leichhardt Municipal Council
“We had a need for a simple but effective backup and replication solution. ShadowProtect was able to accommodate this need. It's smart software at a very reasonable price.” Jon Dundas - Manager Administration & Information Technology, Maitland City Council
Moving from a tape-based storage environment last year to a disk-based one has paid dividends for retirement village operator, MetLifeCare. MetLifeCare had used several tape-based packages over the previous 10 years, most recently Symantec Backup Exec.
“When licensing for that product was up for renewal last year, it was a good opportunity to consider a new backup system," says Kai Sander, IT Manager at MetLifeCare.
Implementation was made easier by the fact MetLifeCare was using VMware and that StorageCraft and VMware are partners, however, even if MetLifeCare hadn't been a VMware site, "it wouldn't really have mattered - we would probably still have chosen StorageCraft."
Under the new arrangement, data and key databases are backed up every quarter of an hour - "and it's proven itself when people have deleted files and we've got them back within 15 minutes.” MetLifeCare - Success Story - "I haven't seen anything better"
The authority has implemented the ShadowProtect disk-based backup and disaster recovery solution from StorageCraft, which has reduced data loss from a typical 18 hours in the event of a computer crash, to only 15 - 30 minutes.
“What previously meant several hours' downtime has been reduced to minutes with ShadowProtect. We can recover an entire server on to different hardware and have it fully operational within half an hour. This represents almost immediate disaster recovery. What has impressed us most is its hardware independent restore technology, which works flawlessly and adds only a few minutes to the rebuild process.”
Alvaro also values the technology's ability to test backups using integration with VMware. He can test backups with a few mouse clicks and bring up a production server into a non-production virtual environment to prove that backups have worked correctly. Alvaro Lozano - Rous Water, Regional Water Supply
“We use ShadowProtect IT Edition as part of our strategy in new desktop deployments. With ShadowProtect we can image desktops with complex software configurations and migrate them to the new hardware without having to re-install the original software. It saves us a considerable amount of time."
"Great solution - Thanks StorageCraft.” Ann Royston - IT Desktop Administrator, Wyong Shire Council
