Glasgow-based PW Hall has been manufacturing plastics for more than 50 years. It currently employs 50 people and caters for both UK and exports markets. The company’s previous tape backup and recovery solution was proving to be unreliable. The backup window reached 13 hours as the legacy system battled with large amounts of data, limiting PW Hall to one daily backup. If an outage did occur, a member of the team would have to travel six miles off-site to retrieve tape backups before the restore could begin to take place. Even a few short hours without crucial data impacted on manufacturing, sales and productivity.
PW Hall enlisted the help of reseller Epaton to select a backup and recovery solution that could handle its data volumes and cut down the time it took to backup and recover business-critical data. Epaton specialises in helping customers make the move away from tape and is expert in next generation storage, converged, hyper-converged and software defined solutions. After a successful two-month trial of Arcserve UDP Appliance with Arcserve Cloud, the Epaton and Arcserve teams worked together to ensure a glitch-free implementation.
Now, the appliance protects 850GB of data that is core to manufacturing and sales processes: reduced from 3TB through deduplication. This includes flat files, SQL, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and Exchange mailbox data across 12 virtual and five physical servers.
Instead of one time-consuming overnight backup, the system makes incremental backups throughout the day, reducing the backup window to approximately 90 minutes. Backups run every six hours for servers where the change in the data is low, and every four hours where the server data delta is high. These backups are then replicated offsite to Arcserve Cloud.
Robert Jackson, PW Hall IT manager said: “Outages were a nightmare – one of us would have to drive six miles to pick up our backed up tape before we could even start to restore missing data. And the backups themselves were time consuming and difficult. But it all takes care of itself now, and we have a much more efficient means of restoring data. We don’t need to be actively involved anymore so it frees us up to focus on other tasks such as testing recovery points and other business-focused tasks.”
Arcserve UK and Ireland territory director, Richard Massey added: “A 13-hour backup window is not something any company should have to contend with. Backup and recovery are essential, but they should also be simple. Something IT managers can set up and leave, so they can get on with their jobs. And that’s what we’ve provided for PW Hall.”
