45 Minute Recovery is what Sold the Rug Doctor on CDP
Sometimes it is difficult to put a price tag on "peace of mind" especially as it relates to having the confidence that application data can be recovered regardless of the scope of the disaster. But today more IT administrators are finding that elusive peace of mind. One such individual is Bill Ellis, the IT Infrastructure Manager for the Rug Doctor, Inc., whose confidence in his ability to recover data got a huge boost after testing and implementing the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) solution.
Most IT managers can probably relate to the situation that Ellis was confronting earlier this year. Managing backups was just one of the many tasks that he has to daily perform in his role as IT infrastructure Manager for the Rug Doctor. So while backing up 23 virtual machines and a few physical servers did not consume all of his time, it minimally consumed an hour of his time each day and, on days when file restores were needed, another 1 - 2 hours could be shot.
However what prompted his interest in finding a new backup solution for his environment was the amount of time it was taking to backup his Lotus Notes Domino server. It was taking 48 hours to do a full backup of this application and, since the Rug Doctor has offices in Plano, TX, as well in the UK, when employees were coming to work in the UK on Monday morning (which was 2 am CST in Dallas) backups of the email server had still not finished which was interfering with their work.
Further aggravating his problem, to do a full, verifiable backup of his Lotus Notes Domino server required that he take the email application offline. Long term this situation was untenable as employees could not send or receive email using their corporate mail server until the backup was complete.
So Ellis began to evaluate a number of backup solutions but was put off by the first two products that caught his eye as he had to make an investment in their software and/or hardware before he could deploy either of these solutions. Further, he wanted to replicate data off-site for disaster recovery which these solutions did not offer.
He then ran across Global Data Vault and its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) offering which is based on the FalconStor CDP solution. Unlike the other offerings he had evaluated, the FalconStor CDP solution was part of a managed service offering from Global Data Vault so there was no upfront investment in hardware or software - he only had to pay a monthly subscription fee.
To test the effectiveness of this solution, Ellis first used it to backup up his two largest application servers - his Lotus Notes Domino server with 850 GBs of data and his company file server which had 1.2 TBs of data on it. He completed the installs of the FalconStor CDP software on these servers in 15 minutes and then rebooted them.
Once the servers came up the FalconStor CDP immediately started backing them up. These backups completed without any issues and restores of files and email mailboxes from these backups also occurred without incident.
Ellis then wanted to see if he quickly he could build a fail over server should he loose an application server (physical or virtual.) To perform this task, he built a test server, put the FalconStor software on it, backed it up and then turned it off. He then built another server, got the install CD and rebuilt that test server in less than 45 minutes using the FalconStor recovery CD.
This portion of the testing revealed to Ellis that recovering any server in his environment using FalconStor could now for the most part be done in an hour or less. He says, "The concept is the same regardless of how much data a server has. You build a virtual machine (VM), mount the CD, hit the rebuild button and you are off to the races. The ease and speed of recovery are what sold me on FalconStor."
Having been convinced of FalconStor's value proposition, he used the same argument when he presented the solution to the Rug Doctor's CIO. He explained that the Rug Doctor only had a staff of 3 people so if something happened to the building, trying to rebuild all of the application servers in 24 hours was inconceivable using their current tape backup methodology.
So the return on investment (ROI) associated with using Global Data Vault and FalconStor was twofold. Yes, there were savings associated with eliminating tape and offsite tape storage costs.
But just as important, the Rug Doctor now had the confidence that its backups were completing successfully and, because Global Data Vault also acted as a Managed Service Provider (MSP), the Rug Doctor's data was automatically replicated to its offsite data center. This provided the Rug Doctor the additional level of confidence that it could recover its application servers almost anywhere and within 24 hours even in a worst case scenario.
Very few IT Managers that I know look forward to becoming or have the time to become backup experts. Rather most just want backup and recovery to be "check boxes" that they can daily "mark off" as complete so they can get on to the more pressing tasks that they have before them.
The Rug Doctor's Ellis is no different. By implementing the FalconStor CDP solution provided to him by Global Data Vault, he got the peace of mind that he was seeking in regards to having confidence that his backups were completing successfully. But just as important, he eliminated his backup windows (since CDP requires no backup window), he got the offsite, anywhere, anytime recovery his business needed and he and his staff got back the numerous hours that they were daily spending on a task that was adding minimal to no intrinsic value to the Rug Doctor's business.
Most IT managers can probably relate to the situation that Ellis was confronting earlier this year. Managing backups was just one of the many tasks that he has to daily perform in his role as IT infrastructure Manager for the Rug Doctor. So while backing up 23 virtual machines and a few physical servers did not consume all of his time, it minimally consumed an hour of his time each day and, on days when file restores were needed, another 1 - 2 hours could be shot.
However what prompted his interest in finding a new backup solution for his environment was the amount of time it was taking to backup his Lotus Notes Domino server. It was taking 48 hours to do a full backup of this application and, since the Rug Doctor has offices in Plano, TX, as well in the UK, when employees were coming to work in the UK on Monday morning (which was 2 am CST in Dallas) backups of the email server had still not finished which was interfering with their work.
Further aggravating his problem, to do a full, verifiable backup of his Lotus Notes Domino server required that he take the email application offline. Long term this situation was untenable as employees could not send or receive email using their corporate mail server until the backup was complete.
So Ellis began to evaluate a number of backup solutions but was put off by the first two products that caught his eye as he had to make an investment in their software and/or hardware before he could deploy either of these solutions. Further, he wanted to replicate data off-site for disaster recovery which these solutions did not offer.
He then ran across Global Data Vault and its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) offering which is based on the FalconStor CDP solution. Unlike the other offerings he had evaluated, the FalconStor CDP solution was part of a managed service offering from Global Data Vault so there was no upfront investment in hardware or software - he only had to pay a monthly subscription fee.
To test the effectiveness of this solution, Ellis first used it to backup up his two largest application servers - his Lotus Notes Domino server with 850 GBs of data and his company file server which had 1.2 TBs of data on it. He completed the installs of the FalconStor CDP software on these servers in 15 minutes and then rebooted them.
Once the servers came up the FalconStor CDP immediately started backing them up. These backups completed without any issues and restores of files and email mailboxes from these backups also occurred without incident.
Ellis then wanted to see if he quickly he could build a fail over server should he loose an application server (physical or virtual.) To perform this task, he built a test server, put the FalconStor software on it, backed it up and then turned it off. He then built another server, got the install CD and rebuilt that test server in less than 45 minutes using the FalconStor recovery CD.
This portion of the testing revealed to Ellis that recovering any server in his environment using FalconStor could now for the most part be done in an hour or less. He says, "The concept is the same regardless of how much data a server has. You build a virtual machine (VM), mount the CD, hit the rebuild button and you are off to the races. The ease and speed of recovery are what sold me on FalconStor."
Having been convinced of FalconStor's value proposition, he used the same argument when he presented the solution to the Rug Doctor's CIO. He explained that the Rug Doctor only had a staff of 3 people so if something happened to the building, trying to rebuild all of the application servers in 24 hours was inconceivable using their current tape backup methodology.
So the return on investment (ROI) associated with using Global Data Vault and FalconStor was twofold. Yes, there were savings associated with eliminating tape and offsite tape storage costs.
But just as important, the Rug Doctor now had the confidence that its backups were completing successfully and, because Global Data Vault also acted as a Managed Service Provider (MSP), the Rug Doctor's data was automatically replicated to its offsite data center. This provided the Rug Doctor the additional level of confidence that it could recover its application servers almost anywhere and within 24 hours even in a worst case scenario.
Very few IT Managers that I know look forward to becoming or have the time to become backup experts. Rather most just want backup and recovery to be "check boxes" that they can daily "mark off" as complete so they can get on to the more pressing tasks that they have before them.
The Rug Doctor's Ellis is no different. By implementing the FalconStor CDP solution provided to him by Global Data Vault, he got the peace of mind that he was seeking in regards to having confidence that his backups were completing successfully. But just as important, he eliminated his backup windows (since CDP requires no backup window), he got the offsite, anywhere, anytime recovery his business needed and he and his staff got back the numerous hours that they were daily spending on a task that was adding minimal to no intrinsic value to the Rug Doctor's business.
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