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ShadowProtect is protecting all of LION's operational servers in Australia and New Zealand, including those at remote sites. As well as SCADA operations, these include file servers, print servers, virus servers. The servers also run security cameras and general security. The site backs up about 1.6TB of information, while larger breweries like Tooheys in Sydney back up around 7-8TB.
“Fortunately, ShadowProtect allows us to restore a crashed server in about 20 minutes. ShadowProtect will restore a server to the same machine, a different one, or even a virtual environment. At present, LION has licensed more than 250 copies of StorageCraft, and seven ShadowProtect IT Editions," Sandy Pennisi, LION.
Sandy also has a good word for ShadowProtect support. When another brewery had initial problems, he contacted local supplier XSI, one of StorageCraft's channel partners in Brisbane. The StorageCraft Asia Pacific support team were able to reproduce the issue and resolved it quickly. "We were raving about how quickly and efficiently it was all resolved. It is great to see a vendor invest in Australian-based support infrastructure to help ensure that in the rare event that a problem develops, it can be solved quickly and professionally," said Sandy. "StorageCraft delivers an excellent value proposition for protecting our SCADA, Telemetry and Windows™ servers - it really has really eliminated the cost, the complexity and the pain of backing up our critical systems.”
Sandy Pennisi - LION, Australia |
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15 hour backup window down to 90 minutes!
FremantleMedia Australia, this country's leading TV production, licensing and distribution company (e.g. Neighbours, So You Think You Can Dance, Australian Idol, and The Biggest Loser), has slashed its data backup window from 15 hours to 2-3 hours, and down to 90 minutes in some instances, by using ShadowProtect from StorageCraft.
“Using ShadowProtect Server we are able to achieve on-the-fly images for incremental backups, allowing us to restore files very quickly and efficiently," said Alan Fear. "Previously we were backing up servers to tape. It would take about 15 hours. Now we are doing disk-to-disk using ShadowProtect, our backup window has shrunk to between two and three hours. Some servers take only 90 minutes to back up.”
Alan Fear, IT Manager - Fremantle Media |
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Management at bedding manufacturer Sealy NZ Ltd are sleeping more soundly at night after switching to an offsite remote disaster recovery (DR) solution that ensures they lose no more than 15 minutes' data in the event of a crash. The problem was identified during an annual IT review. Although the company's former tape backup product was reporting successful backups, minimal data was being written to tape in a readable format. As a result, Sealy sought an alternative solution.
“We experienced the pain of potential data loss and decided we never wanted to be in that position again. We made a strategic decision to go with an organisation and solution that was able to eliminate the cost and complexity of backup, file recovery and disaster recovery (DR).”
The solution was implemented by Disaster Recovery Group (DRG), which uses StorageCraft's ShadowProtect backup solution.
Hugh Rockfort - Director, Sealy NZ Ltd |
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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 |
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As a State School, our budgets are very limited and we have to watch every dollar. We migrated to ShadowProtect for less than the annual maintenance renewal on our existing backup product. Now that is value for money, especially when you consider that if we had renewed the maintenance on our existing backup product we could still have the same problems next year as we had this year!"
"StorageCraft really have delivered an outstanding solution at the right price point, so much that I would recommend every other school or company to seriously look at StorageCraft ShadowProtect when their backup product maintenance is up for renewal.”
Ferny Grove State High School - "Backup as simple as ABC" |
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ShadowProtect backs up Multiple Sclerosis Limited Email Archive server in 45 minutes, vs. 12 hours with traditional tape backup methods.
Multiple Sclerosis Limited (MSL) is backing up an email archive server with 100GB of attachments to disk in 45 minutes using StorageCraft's ShadowProtect, compared to the 12 hours it would take using traditional tape backup methods.
Technical team leader Shane Bryan switched to disk for the email archive server to reduce backup times and increase recoverability of the email archive server attachment volume.
His team put in a new email archive server, attached this to their EMC storage area network (SAN) device, and now carry out nightly backups using ShadowProtect real-time imaging (taking complete snapshots of the 100GB, and growing, archive volume).
“If the server were to crash, the included Hardware Independent Restore (HIR) technology allows us to rebuild the server completely to the same or totally different hardware, or even a virtual environment in minutes instead of days. We even migrated an end-of-life server from a Compaq to a Dell recently and it went without incident, which was impressive. All that was needed was a small driver update for the new hardware.”
Additionally, Multiple Sclerosis Limited invested in StorageCraft ShadowProtect to take daily backups of its Citrix and SQL servers to compliment their Change Control processes and guard against potential loss of data and wasted time when carrying out routine maintenance such as upgrading applications and installing patches. Using ShadowProtect real-time imaging, it takes an average of 15-20 minutes to backup the OS volume of each server.
Shane Bryan - Multiple Sclerosis Limited |
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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 |
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Charged with managing over 54 servers and 12 terabytes of data daily, scan data services firm Synovate Aztec needed a solution to assist it to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) set by its clients for its backup and recovery technology.
“We had a substantial investment in our previous backup and recovery product, however, regardless of how much money and time we invested, it quite simply failed to live up to its expectations and price tag.
With ShadowProtect I am confident we will never lose more than 15-minutes of data or database or Exchange emails, and if one of our critical production servers crashed, we could rebuild it, migrate it to dissimilar hardware or even to a virtual environment in minutes and restore it to the exact state immediately prior to the crash.
Within two weeks we had placed the order and commenced deployment to the production servers.”
Synovate Aztec - Over 54 servers & 12TB - backup is critical |
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“Easy to install, easy to manage, easy to use and compared to other products - it works!”
John Koch, Network & Communications Analyst |
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“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 |
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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 |
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“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 |
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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 |
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“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 |
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“I am a tough IT Manager to please. It has been a long time since I have seen a product as versatile and as easy to use as ShadowProtect. With a tight budget and aging hardware, I sleep better at night knowing my servers are 100% protected from any sort of failure."
"Never has a software package got me so excited. To perform a bare metal rebuild of my Domain Controller onto different hardware was fantastic. To do it in under an hour blew me away. The ease of use with managing your backups is amazing. The new ways ShadowProtect allows you to manage data restoration takes disaster recovery to a new level."
"For under $1000 per server, ShadowProtect offers great value for money and a low TCO. The free training (not that I think anyone needs it) provides your IT staff with all the knowledge they need to effortlessly manage and maintain full server protection.”
Geoff King - IT Manager, Sphere Healthcare |
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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" |
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“ShadowProtect is proving its worth. We are using it to protect critical information on all of the company servers. By taking a full image on Sundays and automated hourly incremental backups during the week, we can restore at any time and on any hardware with minimal data loss in the event of a disaster.”
Scott Harris - IT Manager, Miller Harris Lawyers |
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Being in the hospitality business, our business depends on our booking system, it’s crucial to the way we conduct business and how our customers contact us.”
Our IT support organisation, Total Network Support, suggested we implement ShadowProtect as our primary backup / disaster recovery application.
Just a few weeks later our main server crashed on the Thursday of the AFL Grand Final Week - losing all the booking details for 190 rooms. As we had just installed this product, Total Network Support had us up and going again in half a day, with no lost data...
We absolutely recommend StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect, as with our previous nightly tape-based backup system, and using normal restoration and recovery procedures, we could well have been offline for at least two days, as well as losing all bookings since the previous night’s tape-based backup.
I recommend the StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect solution to everyone in the hospitality industry, it certainly saved us.”
Yann Duroselle – Executive General Manager
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Instead of taking more than a day to recover data and get back online, as it would have done using their former Symantec Backup Exec system, the ShadowProtect solution from StorageCraft had them up and running again within two hours. Business disruption was minimal.
“The sheer size of our system after we centralised demanded that we used a backup solution that was easier to use and restored files faster. ShadowProtect is much faster than our previous solution - up to twice as fast depending on configurations - and better for our business needs.”
The Oaks Group has 40 ShadowProtect Server Edition licenses protecting file servers, print servers, SQL clusters, an Exchange cluster as well as Citrix servers and general servers. Mr. Solly introduced ShadowProtect after using it in a previous job.
Bryn Solly - IT General Manager, Oaks Hotels and Resorts Limited |
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Fernando Aguero believes he may owe his job to the effectiveness of StorageCraft's disk-based real time recovery and data protection, ShadowProtect.
As Regional IT & T Manager, Pacific, for Sydney-based Bürkert Fluid Control Systems, he was in New Zealand when he discovered that the group's main server had crashed. He was able to talk the company's Chief Finance Officer in Sydney through the process of using ShadowProtect to restore the crashed machine. This took just 20 minutes.
“I now swear by ShadowProtect. It could possibly have saved my job," said Fernando. He added: "These things always seem to happen when I'm not on-site! But the fact that I was able to talk a non tech-savvy person through the boot-up procedure to restore a domain controller says a lot for ShadowProtect."
"The restore process took less than 20 minutes," said Fernando. "ShadowProtect exceeded our expectations by several hundred per cent."
He says, "They used a combination of two different products: Computer Associates' ARCserve and Symantec Backup Exec. One was backing up to a tape drive and the other backing up intermittently to a network share. Essentially they were not working very well. Usually restores didn't work, even though the backups were saying they were OK.”
Bürkert's outsourced IT company, TechPatrol, recommended ShadowProtect, which Fernando bought after seeing a demonstration. He finds it fast and reliable.
Fernando Aguero - IT Manager, Bürkert Control Fluid Systems.
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ShadowProtect saves the day at Harasty's - a supplier of skilled hospitality personnel to Sydney's conference and catering facilities. Sean Bloch, CEO from IT Manager on Demand (Harasty's IT Provider) said:
“It took about three minutes for the restore to run, and six minutes to complete the check disk - on a substantial 40GB partition," said Sean. "The operating system and data on Exchange, MYOB, files and Access were all recovered - amazing! I'm scared even to think about the alternatives. It would have meant a tape drive backup, a six-hour rebuild of the partition, then all workstations on the network would have required reconfiguring. They would have been lucky to be up and running by the following week.”
Sean Bloch - ITMD technician on behalf of Harasty's |
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Madison Financial Group who use IT Manager on Demand as their outsourced IT provider also used ShadowProtect to migrate a networked system to new hardware. The customer has a four-server environment, so they swapped information on two servers to the other two using ShadowProtect imaging, and upgraded the two 'down' servers before imaging the information back to them. Then they upgraded the other two servers in a similar way.
“To upgrade the four servers and all upgrades took two days. It would have been impossible to do this without ShadowProtect: we would have had to rebuild in what could have been a three-week project," said Sean. "The HIR (Hardware Independent Restore) technology is a life saver and we believe critical for any recovery technology. StorageCraft include HIR as standard. StorageCraft's HIR is easy, fast and rock solid. HIR has the ability to add new drivers on the fly and uses a genuine Microsoft based Recovery environment which we believe is important if you are restoring a Microsoft Windows server.”
Sean Bloch - ITMD technician on behalf of Madison Financial Group |
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ShadowProtect came to the rescue when a server at Aruze Gaming suffered a motherboard crash. IT Manager on Demand's (Aruze's IT Service Provider) people took the server to their office and managed to swap a ShadowProtect image across to a different hardware platform inside two hours.
When the motherboard was replaced a week later, the role-swapping process was repeated in reverse. The operation took two hours for each server and since it took place at night, Aruze Gaming lost no processing time.
“ShadowProtect HIR makes hardware migrations a trivial process and eliminates stress from us and our customers - it makes us more efficient and has enabled us to deliver even higher levels of service to our customers. The ability to restore an Exchange, SQL or SharePoint server in minutes back to its ExactState as of 15 minutes ago is incredible.”
Sean Bloch - ITMD technician on behalf of Azure Gaming |
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“The most important part of any disaster recovery solution isn't the backup procedure and ease of use undefined it's the reliability and speed during a restore. We tested this in a lab with each backup product, but the ultimate test is when your server is dead (and when users are screaming) and you have to bring it back online. That's when you really have to trust your software. Make sure that whichever product is chosen, a lot of testing is done to ensure it will perform as expected when calamity strikes.”
Editor's Choice Award - 4.5 Stars - APC Magazine, August 2007 |
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“When Auckland company James Odell, which customises cars, was gutted by a fire, it was faced with a wrecked laptop that contained all the vital information about the company."
"The laptop was melted and burnt, as well as being water-damaged from fire hoses, and would have looked to most people as if it was beyond repair."
"But the company was able to retrieve its valuable data by using ShadowProtect software and virtualisation technology and was able to re-open from new premises just days later."
"James Odell contracted Softsource to retrieve the data and also to rebuild the company's IT infrastructure. This now includes new servers, PCs and a laptop.”
Planning for the unlikely - and the unthinkable (view article)
Backup and recovery are imperative to even small businesses |
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“The ShadowProtect Desktop image-backup utility would be worth ten times its price for the peace of mind it brings. You won't find a better product in this field."
"This software provides the fastest and smoothest backups and restores of any drive-image utility on the market, and a Vista-based emergency disk guarantees compatibility with the widest range of backup hardware. ShadowProtect Desktop is the best such product and worth ten times its price in terms of peace of mind and flexibility."
"Fast, reliable image backups to local and network drives. Easy restores, even to different hardware. Plentiful scheduling and security options. Can mount images in VMware Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC.”
Editor's Choice Award - PC Magazine |
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“As an owner of an IT support business, we have found it extremely difficult to find a backup software which does an excellent job at conducting backups and can be relied on to restore the system back to its original state. We’ve encountered the same problems with each software package we’ve tested; Constant errors with backups, programs too difficult to manage and configure, and most importantly backup software which simply can’t restore the data in an event of a system crash. After a demonstration of Storagecraft® ShadowProtect® we decided to give the software a go and install it on our in-house systems and recommend it to our clients. When one of our client’s system crashed, we replaced the system with a brand new machine and put ShadowProtect software to the test.
ShadowProtect was extremely easy to use and we were able to restore our client’s complete system on the new machine. The images worked like a treat and after 45 minutes my client’s new system was operational to the exact state it had been on the machine that had crashed. Our client was able to get back to work with minimal downtime and thanks to ShadowProtect, we came out as heroes.
I can’t express how satisfied we have been with this backup and disaster recovery software and I would personally recommend ShadowProtect to any computer user, whether it may be for business or home use.”
Alexsander Talevski, Managing Director, Benchmark IT Solutions |
