Case Studies
Case Studies

Leading U.K. Construction Firm Turns to S3 and EVault for "Clean" Online Backup and Recovery Solution

As a leading civil engineering and construction firm, Fitzpatrick can have as many as 40 different job sites where roads, bridges, airports, and other structures are being built throughout the U.K. This distributed workforce is also reflected in its information technology (IT) infrastructure.

As part of its IT infrastructure that supports some 1,000 employees, Fitzpatrick's 12-person IT staff manages 15 Windows 2000 servers located at its main Hoddesdon, U.K. office, and 10-15 additional servers at any one time distributed across six regional offices and 40 or so job sites. To back up its servers, Fitzpatrick used Computer Associates ARCserve software. However, having a comprehensive and centralized backup management capability including the ability to recover data quickly was difficult, if not impossible, using traditional tape-based processes.

"In these remote situations, we could never really effectively manage backup and recovery because we don't have the IT people there to add and remove the tapes and get them off-site," recalled Kevin Wyley, Fitzpatrick WAN manager.

The importance of the data was such that even if Fitzpatrick did not have IT staff on-site to swap tapes in and out, the data needed to be backed up. In addition, because of the transitory nature of construction sites, the portable buildings were only linked by DSL connections at best. The company turned to Solid State Solutions (S3), a storage integrator based in Bramley, U.K. to help solve these issues. Taking a vendor agnostic-approach, S3 engineers working with Fitzpatrick determined that disk-to-disk backup, if it could lessen the amount of data moving over the network, could alleviate the issues the firm experienced and provide more reliable and "cleaner" solution.

"As you can imagine, construction sites are not the cleanest environment and tapes get dirty and do not work," says Wyley. "However, our primary need was to be able to conduct the backups over existing links we had. With the amount of data being backed up and sent over the network, our previous solution took too long and we had a difficult time verifying the completion remotely."

As a true, disk-to-disk solution, S3 engineers recognized that EVault InfoStage™ software would enable Fitzpatrick answer that top concern of getting data over their network without having to add more infrastructure and create additional management responsibilities.

Once backup agents are installed on the servers, EVault DeltaPro™ technology scans for and then backs up only new and altered files since the previous backup. This component of EVault InfoStage takes those changes, compresses and then encrypts the data before being sent over the network back to a storage device. Because it's only taking new and altered files and compressing the information, often less than five percent of the total data will be sent over the network each day. The automated process proved beneficial in several ways:

  • Ensured that the network bandwidth would not be taxed by conducting backups.
  • Because the backed up data went straight from the server to the electronic storage device, no longer did IT staff have to commute out to job sites to conduct manual tasks such as labeling and rotating tapes or deal with administering to tape libraries.
  • Full backups do not need to be conducted each week as with incremental-style backup performed by tape-based software. In addition to eliminating any potential network bandwidth issue, less data is actually sent to the storage device, creating less data to manage.

Having knocked out the bandwidth concerns using EVault technology, S3 was also able to improve the reliability and security of Fitzpatrick's backup process. Tapes, with information critical to the business and the project on site, no longer sat subject to environment conditions of a job site. Having the data encrypted while transferred over the network and while being stored back in Hoddesdon provided much-improved security.

"That was a key capability for us because having tape devices and media at these remote sites was not the most secure solution for us and it's just not ever going to be feasible to have an IT presence at those locations," Wyley acknowledged.

Following an installation and integration described by Wyley as "pretty smooth," the Fitzpatrick IT staff is seeing a significant return on investment in terms of peace of mind. Data is consistently getting backed up and easily and securely getting off the job site and within a data facility and their file-level restores have been equally smooth. Gone is the money being spent on tape libraries and media.

"As an integrator, the bottom line is that we don't get paid until the customer is happy," says S3 sales director Andy Hill. "So it's important for us to integrate cost-effective solutions that install seamlessly and operate reliably. EVault InfoStage has worked here like a dream."

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