Aztec discovery leads to data protection in real-time

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.

The company's IT manager, Warren Gerdes, said it was hard to find a solution despite committing substantial funds to the problem.

"Data is our life blood. Using our advanced technology, organisations like Woolworths, Nestle, Colgate, and Unilever are able to very rapidly see trends in products being sold and implement programs to maximise profits and increase complementary product sales," Gerdes said.

"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."

The company's server environment covered Windows 2000, 2003, Exchange, Web and SQL.

Synovate Aztec, which was established in 1995 as Aztec Information Systems, was introduced to StorageCraft by its primary server vendor Xenon Systems.

As a result the company implemented StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server Edition.

"At first I did not believe it was possible to protect data in real-time, down to every 15 minutes - but it was the Disaster Recovery capability that impressed us the most," Gerdes said.

"With ShadowProtect I am confident we will never lose more than 15-minutes of data or database or Exchange e-mails and if one of our critical production servers crash, we can 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."

Synovate Aztec first noticed a drop in performance following an acquisition.

"It became pretty apparent that a one backup solution was insufficient," he said.

Gerdes began a 30-day trial and used a couple of non-critical servers in the network for testing.

"Within two weeks we had placed the order and commenced deployment to the production servers," he said.

"Thankfully, there has been no disasters as that's the last thing I wish to see, but the software has worked well as a maintenance tool for replacing hard drives which have had disk events logged.

"Last week, one of out critical servers logged a potential drive failure, and I had the boot drive changed and the server up within the hour.

"We are also using the software to archive the Windows Vista images on new desktop acquisitions so the license can be reused later when all the bugs are gone."

StorageCraft opened its APAC headquarters in Sydney in 2006 declaring its goal in the region is to provide enterprise class backup, recovery and disaster solutions at price points that are highly attractive to small business.

Only last year, the company's regional mangaer, Greg Wyman, said the company had sold more than 3000 licenses in its first 14 months of operation.

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