SEP Software Stands out Among Competitors as Fastest Backup Solution for Underwriters Safety and Claims

SEP Software Stands out Among Competitors as Fastest Backup Solution for Underwriters Safety and Claims

SEP Backup Solution Exponentially Reduces Company’s Backup Windows

Boulder, CO - December 14, 2015 - 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. Director of Technology for Underwriters, Grant Nickle, has had extensive experience with a wide spectrum of backup solutions, including Arcserve, Syncsort Backup Express, Symantec NetBackup, Symantec Backup Exec, vRanger, Veeam and Arkeia. Nickle was now tasked with finding a new backup solution to replace Arkeia.

Underwriters chose SEP Software to back up their entire environment and they have enjoyed great success as a result. “Moving to SEP was a great decision. It has solved all of our immediate business needs and provided the flexibility to solve needs that will come up moving forward. It has really been a great business acquisition, but more importantly, it is very fast. Compared to our last software, our backup windows with SEP are around 55 percent faster. It was actually so quick at first, I was shocked! After we first installed the software and it started running backups, it was so fast that I literally started thinking, ‘it can’t be this quick; it can’t be right.’ So we looked at several things, verified them, restored them, looked through what had been catalogued and it was right. SEP really is that fast. SEP has reduced our nightly backup window by at least six hours. On the weekends, when we basically snapshot everything, which is about 65 servers and around 14 TB of data, SEP backs everything up in 40 percent of the time it took with Arkeia. So that is 60 percent faster! Before it took around 24 hours and now it only takes 10,” Nickle remarked.

SEP’s multi-streaming technology is so fast, in fact, Nickle thought it best in the beginning to roll back some of SEP’s capabilities to remain cautious with the high performance ratios SEP provides. Nickle explained, “SEP’s default is to run 25 simultaneous backup streams at one time, but when we set it up, I throttled that back to 5 streams simply for our own comfort. I didn’t want to overwhelm our vCenter servers. But even with the reduction from 25 to 5, our backups are still over 50percent faster with SEP. We are going to slowly increase that number up to the optimized number of streams for SEP to run even faster. And since SEP will literally use everything that is given to it in terms of bandwidth, I am sure if we are running 25 streams at one time, it may be 80 percent faster then what we have already seen.

“With VMware snapshot files, SEP can multi-stream and run 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, etc. simultaneously. That is the biggest increase in efficiency and speed we have seen because we are now able to stream all of these snapshots at one time. If we are running a backup through a fiber channel and we are running 10 snapshots at one time, we will get efficiency from however much bandwidth through that fiber channel we will give the software; so this reduction is significant. Another thing we really liked about SEP, was the fact that you get an agent with this really robust VMware API snapshot type backup. You are almost always going to do your file level backup, because you may have just one or two files you need or have a physical machine that you can’t virtualize. But the SEP agent seems like a more holistic approach compared to vRanger or Veeam, where they may only be applicable if you are in a Hyper-V or VMware bubble. I can definitely say solutions like vRanger and Veeam are far harder to install than SEP, far more difficult to manage, and they have high setup requirements. Anything that is Microsoft-centered, like Backup Exec, Veeam, and vRanger, require external Windows services. For instance, there may be a SQL server required, or you may need to have 2 or 3 Windows servers to do the same thing and the resources you have to give to then are 3 or 4 times the resources we have given to SEP.  They are just problematic, not nearly as reliable as SEP so far.”

Nickle mentioned he would very much recommend SEP to anyone and has, in fact, already done so. “This software is unbelievable compared to what I have dealt with before,” said Nickle “This software is like driving around in a Mercedes   versus driving around in an old, rusty pickup truck, there is just no comparison. What it comes down to is, SEP is extremely purpose built. It does what it does very well, there is nothing extra in its interface, there is not a lot of clutter, there is nothing that you don’t need, it doesn’t look piece-built together and it is very well engineered and well thought out. For me personally, that is so refreshing because I see a lot of software that I think people have just pieced together and no one ever really sat down and thought about it from beginning to end   to make it flow nicely. Other backup software like Backup Exec is unbelievably difficult to understand and is so cluttered that it becomes difficult to use, but not SEP.”

To read the full Underwriters Safety and Claims case study and for more information on SEP and its product offerings, visit www.sepusa.com/node/7866 or email info@sepusa.com.

About Underwriters Safety and Claims

Underwriters Safety and Claims is a nationwide insurance agency and service provider with offices in 13 states. Founded in 1941, the innovative company has built a strong reputation as a quality provider of workers compensation, commercial and personal insurance products and services, and third party administration for medical claims. For more information, visit http://www.uscky.com/.

About SEP Software Corp.

SEP Software offers a single backup and disaster recovery solution for heterogeneous environments of any size. SEP's flagship solution, SEP sesam, uses its multi-streaming technology to facilitate unlimited simultaneous data streams to provide some of the highest performance in the backup market. SEP is cross-platform, multi-OS, and supports every popular database and Groupware solution available. Exceptional remote management capabilities allow users to easily and efficiently manage thousands of locations around the globe from one central location. SEP specializes in replacing multiple backup software products with one standardized solution for the entire enterprise. To find out more about SEP and its products, visit www.sepusa.com.