Quick Facts

Industry

• IT Products and Services
• Managed Services Provider (MSP)

Platforms Requiring Protection

• 350 servers across 35 customer large and small IT environments – and growing
• Windows, NetWare, OES and Linux servers – multiple OS versions, physical and virtual (VMWare) guest servers
• Exchange and GroupWise email systems
• Microsoft SQL Server databases

Challenges

• Needed to shorten backup windows as customer data amounts increase
• Needed a single solution for highly diverse customer networks, each with different data protection requirements
• Needed to manage and monitor automated backups for growing number of customers with limited IT staff
• Needed to remotely manage all customers’ backups with hosted or dedicated remote backup vault for disaster recovery.

Competitors

• No other disk-based solutions offered all the required features

Solutions

• DPU’s at customer sites, DPV’s hosted by BPI Information Systems
• Rapid Recovery Console

Benefits

• Reduced backup windows
• Reduced man-hours to remotely manage  backup service
• Reliable delivery of  affordable, comprehensive disaster recovery solution

BPI Information Systems Protects Dozens of Businesses with Hundreds of Servers with Unitrends

Partner Profile

BPI Information Systems is a computer systems integrator and managed services provider (MSP) headquartered in Brecksville, Ohio, near Cleveland. BPI Information Systems was established in 1976 and has served as a cornerstone for the IT Industry in Northeast Ohio. Privately owned, BPI Information Systems specializes in the design, installation, support, and emergency repair of network solutions for business, government and education.

As part of an ever changing industry, BPI Information Systems is dedicated to providing their clients with the most recent technology advances and keeping their Engineers certified and fully trained.

BPI Information Systems’s mission is to provide the highest level of integration support and service to keep each client’s business functioning without loss of productivity or downtime.

Challenges

In 2005, BPI Information Systems realized that companies of all sizes need to protect their valuable business systems and data around the clock with full-featured cost-effective solutions.

In response to this need, BPI Information Systems began to develop a new services offering: a backup service that would simplify, accelerate, and automate both local and remote backup. The solution needed to offer rapid recovery and complete restoration for most operating systems, especially Windows, NetWare and Linux platforms.

Finally, the solution needed to automate the transfer of backups to an offsite location for affordable distributed disaster recovery.

Unitrends was selected as the only disk-based solution that delivered all the required features. Since 2006, BPI Information Systems has standardized on the Unitrends platform, migrating customers to Unitrends as tape backup systems are due for replacement.

Benefits

With BPI Information Systems’s Unitrends backup service, customer backup windows have shrunk dramatically. D'Amore recalls one customer’s master backup that was taking eighteen hours, and with Unitrends the backup window shrank to seven hours.

Even as the backup window has been reduced, BPI Information Systems customers now enjoy the benefits of whole system protection, meaning that entire servers can be recovered rapidly in the event of server failure. With tape, most customers only had file-level backup. D'Amore noted that prior to Unitrends, some customers had no backup in place at all.

BPI Information Systems is able not only to protect physical servers, but also, with the growth of virtualization, the Unitrends solution permits whole system protection of customers’ virtual servers.

The Unitrends feature set is fully utilized by BPI Information Systems as they tailor each backup implementation to the specific customers’ requirements. “Baremetal, Exchange, SQL, encryption, vaulting, you name it, we use it,” remarks DAmore.

When BPI Information Systems began offering management of customers’ backup systems, DAmore remembers that it would take a team of five hours and hours to review the backup logs and confirm that backups had actually taken place.

Now, with ten times the number of customers, the backups are easily monitored, and any troubleshooting can be handled quickly, usually by the BPI Information Systems team working remotely using the Rapid Recovery Console. Any severe or unusual situations or questions are addressed with  a quick call to Unitrends support, or opening a case through the UConnect support portal. D'Amore remarks that even with the increasing number of customers enrolled in the backup service, the BPI Information Systems team completes there work by early afternoon, leaving the team free to work on other projects for the remainder of the day.

BPI Information Systems knows that planning for an unexpected event can be challenging. When a business is presented with addressing an unknown disaster facing their organization it is essential key backup and data recovery procedures are in place. Offering both local and remote data protection, BPI Information Systems continues to expand their business by delivering a key element to enable their customers’ disaster recovery and business continuity.

“We do have a lot of customer on the VMWare product, and we’re backing up the guest servers with the Unitrends product."

“I like the product, it’s easy to work with and get set up and running in a relatively short time frame.”

“The Unitrends tech support has some of the best people I’ve worked with.”

“Once we became a partner with Unitrends, it was pretty seamless to put our first unit in place.”

“The backup window has gotten shorter for our customers; Unitrends backs up a lot quicker than tape backup.”

“We put these in for customers, and now have 35 Unitrends units out there that we manage every single day.”

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