Case Studies

When Western Digital decided to end-of-life their newly acquired backup software product, Arkeia, Underwriters Safety and Claims was faced with the unexpected challenge of finding a new backup solution.When Western Digital decided to end-of-life their newly acquired backup software product, Arkeia, Underwriters Safety and Claims was faced with the unexpected challenge of finding a new backup solution.

The Lavendon Group, a worldwide market leader in the rental of powered aerial work platforms and mobile elevating work platforms, had administered backups on a server-by-server basis using Symantec’s Backup Exec. This process was incredibly time-consuming with daily management and administration. When Backup Exec discontinued support for a key component of their environment, Lavendon was in trouble.

Etty Hillesum Lyceum operates on 7 physical servers and 90 virtual servers, each with different versions of Windows and Linux. They have a fairly large clustered environment and many applications. Etty Hillesum backs up to disk and then to tape using a 50 slot tape library. Taking budgetary restrictions into consideration, they needed a single solution to protect their mission-critical data.

Mount Aloysius College’s backup software had become overly complicated to achieve the necessary backups the College required. The software was at a point where it needed to be renewed, so the College’s IT Department decided to see what else was out there in terms of full range backup solutions that would support their current and future environments.

"From the time I initially downloaded the software until the time I had it up and running and performing successful backups was about 45 minutes. In fact, I actually called tech support and told them I thought I had done something wrong..."

"Even though we are backing up more servers than ever before, our backup window is much shorter and the ongoing costs with SEP are half as much..."

The Spearfish School District of South Dakota was using Symantec Backup Exec 9 as their backup solution. Unfortunately, it was slow, unreliable and strained the District's valuable hardware, network and resources...

"The installation of SEP went very smoothly. I was quite impressed. The support team was excellent and we got the server up and running the same day..."

Knott Brakes was migrating to a Novell/SUSE O/S platform and Scalix, in a predominantly Microsoft environment, and was in need of a new backup solution that would support their new operating systems and email solution...

"SEP's reliability and the broad spectrum of products offered, as well as their support of all operating systems, databases and groupware solutions, proved the most efficient and cost-effective solution available..."

INFOnline could see that their legacy backup system, which was relying on hard drives attached to servers, would no longer be able to store the increasing amount of data. INFOnline migrated to a multi-tier storage infrastructure with clustered fail-over capacities, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SEP on IBM System x and System p Servers...

Vereinsbank utilized two parallel backup systems, Symantec Veritas Backup Exec and Legato Networker Backup security systems on Unix, which caused heightened expenses and performance challenges. The company additionally maintained two parallel independent data centers for potential fail over. Vereinsbank searched for a cost-effective global solution to centrally secure all of its local databases, including all Oracle and Microsoft SQL server databases...

Unacceptable backup performance was causing SRON to lose valuable computing time and forced the IT Department to skip or stagger backup tasks for mission critical data. A test of the existing Yosemite backup software from Barracuda proved that the product had to be scrapped. After choosing SEP, their backup window reduced from four days to four hours...

Potsdam's IT Department began a step-by-step conversion from physical servers to a Critix XenServer virtual environment. It quickly became evident that their existing backup solution was not going to work in this new virtual environment. The IT team found and tested three different solutions, but the only solution that fulfilled all the requirements was Xen & Now from SEP...

Pflugerville ISD was faced with moving their operation from old, antiquated SAN and server hardware, to a new SAN and virtualized infrastructure. At the time, their backup system was old and based on tape libraries, which had become inconsistent, unreliable, out of warranty and starting to require maintenance. They needed a backup system that would not take up a lot of physical room and would support their environment...

Highland Community College was using a combination of ARCserve to backup file and print servers, vRanger to backup their virtual environment and an assortment of different scripts to cover databases and everything else in their infrastructure. "vRanger was not terribly fast and ARCserve's newer version only supported Windows. We really just wanted on solution to manage everything and consolidate down to one backup platform that fully supported our environment...

"Implementing SEP has allowed us to use other equipment, including our hundred slot ADIC tape library, which was basically unavailable to us with our old solution. The time we spend working on backup related issues has shrunk by a factor of 90% and the acquisition cost for SEP was less than our annual maintenance fee for the old backup solution..."

Andersen Construction Company was using an older version of CA ARCserve backup software, which was proving to be inadequate. "The overhead in time and complexity of running the backups for the remote locations and headquarters demanded we seek a new solution; one that could back up our legacy applications as well as run on Novell's newest OES platform, WMware and our Lefthand Netwroks SAN solution from HP...

As City of Thousand Oaks' data grew, their full backups to tape in their main data center were beginning to take more than 12 hours to complete and were, therefore, restricted to weekend hours. In addition, their daily backups were running into business hours each morning. They were looking to upgrade to a faster product and their current vendor, Symantec, did not offer a compelling solution that would improve performance...