SAI Global (ASX:SAI) has improved disaster recovery and simplified backups since the introduction of data de-duplication technology at the end of last year.
Asia Pacific general manager of IT Peter Macarthur-King told Computerworld Australia that the risk management firm had issues with tape corruption in its old storage environment.
“We had grown over 100 per cent in the last two years so we were out of space in the tape library,” he said.
“Prior to my arrival, it took two weeks to restore a single database. Invariably we found bad tapes and that causes backup issues.”
The previous environment was backing up 800 virtual machines and long backup windows. In addition, there was no guarantee there would not be extended recovery times.
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Macarthur-King put in a request for a backup offering that supported the company’s production data centre and pre-development environment.
After meeting with Actifio and another backup vendor, he decided to go with Actifio as it could offer a single solution for backup and recovery.
“They were a third of the price of the other product and it could be deployed globally. It scales really nicely without having to buy 50 different parts.”
SAI Global is now running a backup environment which offers restores of 51 seconds on a 220 gigabyte (GB) virtual machine and data cloning for test environments.
According to Macarthur-King, he can now go into a board meeting and say that his IT department has the capability to restore data within reasonable periods of time. The perception of IT as a service provider has also lifted within the company.
In addition, he anticipates savings of $300,000 over a three year period as a result of removing the tape backup environment.
“The unseen benefit is the loss of business if we were unable to restore data in a timely manner for some of our bank customers. We could have lost contracts if we were down for a week.”
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