Case Studies
Case Studies

Poster Publicity selects EVault InfoStage™ software from PlumData to centralize, consolidate and protect critical data

As one of the world's leading outdoor media planning firms, working with clients such as VISA, Estee Lauder and British Airways on large billboard campaigns, Poster Publicity was experiencing the challenges of fast-growing data volumes and a requirement to consolidate and protect mission-critical information. In 2003, Mark Tidmus, Poster Publicity's systems support manager, looked to devise a water-tight disaster recovery strategy to protect the business against the threat of data loss, and also reduce insurance premiums.

Charged with managing data availability across four remote offices, Tidmus was understandably reluctant to rely on non-technical colleagues to implement crucial backup procedures. Fortunately, Poster Publicity had not been faced by any significant outages and had deployed a tape-based backup system, with tapes being rotated and taken off-site. Tidmus was also mindful about the time it would take to conduct a restore at a remote office. Asking non-technical personnel to locate, mount and try to access data off 20-40GB tape media was not an economic or reliable long-term solution.

"Insurance companies are starting to ask more questions about the security and reliability of data access, plus we knew that if we didn't centralize the process, we would be putting ourselves in a dangerous position in the event of a major failure." "Decreasing our insurance premiums, whilst improving data security, manageability, storage and recovery were our key objectives," says Tidmus.

The business issues were clear: data was not as secure as Poster needed; manpower inefficiencies were created by the traditional tape-based backup process; and they could never have a consistent overview of the status of backups being conducted in the three other U.K offices. Poster Publicity also maintained high-priced, leased and ADSL network lines that were not being utilized at night.

Turning to PlumData for Answers

Poster Publicity started discussions with PlumData in Autumn, 2003. As an independent data storage solutions provider, PlumData consulted with Poster at some length to garner knowledge of their financial and manpower resources, network infrastructure and their requirement to automate and centralize the backup and recovery process. After Poster evaluated other software offerings such as Veritas, PlumData recommended EVault InfoStage™ software from EVault, Inc.

In addition to providing a more secure, disk-based solution, installing EVault InfoStage alleviated the previous tape backup problems and Poster could utilize existing leased lines that they were paying for, but not using at night. By installing backup agents on each of Poster's 14 servers across three offices, they could now monitor and manage all backup and recovery tasks from one location.

By being able to send backed up data off-site securely each night to their data center in Bradford some 20 miles away, they could confidently address insurance inquiries about disaster recovery procedures and did not have to rotate tapes offsite.

"Initially we looked at replication, but if we would have gone with that, we would not have had any version history and we still would have needed backup," Tidmus recalls.

However, the EVault InfoStage software architecture enables multiple versions of daily, monthly and even yearly backups to be stored in much smaller footprint on the storage array where the information is being held. EVault DeltaPro™ technology provides the equivalent of a full backup every time by scanning for and then saving only changes to files that have altered or been added since the last backup. Depending on data characteristics and how often files/folders are modified, the actual changes being backed up and sent over the Leased/ADSL connections into the storage array at the off-site data center, can be as little as two to four percent of the total capacity.

As a result, Poster could have the required version history and allow for even more retentions held online for faster and easier recovery than was possible with tapes – and without having to consistently add disk space.

Fast, Easy Disk-Based Recovery

Disk-to-disk backup and recovery provided multiple benefits to Poster in terms of centralized management, elimination of cumbersome tape-based processes and the associated manpower resources to manage those processes. Using EVault InfoStage software provided by PlumData, Poster Publicity have streamlined the backup process, which has resulted in better operational control of the remote offices and fewer dedicated resources.

However, to Tidmus, the compelling value of the disk-based solution has been its ease of recovery and the high level of confidence we now have in the Backup solution.

"Restores have certainly been faster, but I was struck just how easy it was to conduct a restore and the fact that it just works.

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