Quick Facts

Industry

• Distribution/Logistics
• Industrial, Safety and Marine Supply

Platforms Requiring Protection

• Windows 2003
• Microsoft Exchange
• Microsoft SQL
• ERP application

Challenges

• Tape backup solution did not provide rapid recovery of whole servers
• File recovery from tape was slow and unreliable
• Needed VMWare support
• Needed improved disaster readiness – no tolerance for lost data or missed deadlines.

Competitors

• Barracuda Networks

Solutions

• DPU-2000
• Rotational (archive) drives

Benefits

• Baremetal recovery to dissimilar hardware
• Fast, reliable backups
• Proven, tested solution

Stellar Industrial Supply Optimizes Backup with Unitrends

Customer Profile

Established in 1988, Stellar Industrial Supply has grown to meet their customer's needs. They have grown to become the Northwest's premier industrial, safety and marine supply, by purchasing additional companies to expand their service areas, adding warehouse locations and by increasing and diversifying their product lines. From eight strategic locations, Stellar serves small, medium and large manufacturers; Federal, State and local municipalities; and commercial construction companies in Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Oregon.

In the extremely competitive industrial supply market, high-volume distributors such as Stellar Industrial Supply must optimize their margins on every transaction, while maintaining customer service, delivery commitments and product quality at the highest level.

Staying ahead of the competition means staying ahead of the curve by making smart technology investments. There is simply no margin for error, and that means no room for IT system outages or downtime. Stellar Industrial Supply manages 35,000 stocking items from more than 1,000 manufacturers across its six locations, and relies on computer systems and automation to support every critical business process.

Challenges

In 2006, Stellar Industrial Supply found that their tape backup solution was not keeping up with their needs. Keith Faller, Senior IT Administrator, said the tape backup would not let them fully recover a failed server to a dissimilar hardware platform. Because it is often impossible to exactly match the hardware when replacing a failed server, the lack of dissimilar recovery presented unacceptable risk of downtime.

Additionally, tape backup was slow and unreliable. This was simply unacceptable, due to Stellar Industrial Supply’s reliance on computer applications to support core business functions, from price optimization, to cost control, logistics, inventory management and ecommerce. Rapid recovery needed to include not only the data files, but also the server configurations, core applications, Microsoft SQL databases, and Microsoft Exchange email.

Faller states that Stellar Industrial Supply did not feel comfortable with the reliability of tape backup software. Faller said that a quicker and more reliable backup solution was needed. And the ability to do bare metal restores to dissimilar hardware was a key requirement, to protect against the risk of business interruption. Faller was concerned about the time and risk involved to manually install, update and configure a server operating system and applications before the recovery of data from tape backup could even begin.

In early 2007, Stellar Industrial Supply purchased a Unitrends DPU 2000 to protect up to 250 GB of system content. By mid-2009 Stellar Industrial Supply had outgrown the original unit, and decided to evaluate different alternatives to Unitrends. They looked at a backup solution offered by Barracuda, but were concerned because of the risk of using a relatively new product.

Compared to Barracuda’s relatively recent product offering, Unitrends offered a far more proven solution. That is why Stellar Industrial Supply decided to expand their software license and take advantage of Unitrends free hardware upgrade promotion.

Benefits

After replacing their tape backup with Unitrends in 2007, Stellar Industrial Supply had gained confidence that they would be able to quickly recover whole systems in the event of disaster. Then over the years, as their business has become increasingly automated, Stellar Industrial Supply’s number of critical IT applications has grown. Meanwhile their total data set size has increased as well. Today Stellar Industrial Supply is backing up nearly 1 TB of system content with whole system protection and disaster readiness.

The June 2009 hardware upgrade and license expansion has allowed Stellar Industrial Supply to continue their Unitrends baremetal, file-level, Exchange, and SQL backups as well as their daily archiving to rotational drives for the purpose of disaster recovery. Their new Unitrends hardware has increased performance and enabled smooth operation of new features in the Rapid Recovery Console (RRC), which Faller finds extremely helpful, not only for monitoring and managing the backups but also for updating the DPU itself.

Stellar Industrial Supply has been fortunate to have experienced only one server crash since the purchase of their Unitrends solution. The server crash was caused by a software update problem. Faller describes how Unitrends performed: “We restored the servers data and were up and running in 30 minutes.”

Faller has found the Unitrends support team to be very helpful, however he has not required much assistance recently. He says, “Since my upgrade to the new DPU, I have not needed to use support.  The new DPU is very reliable.”

Stellar Industrial Supply continues to expand with the objective of remaining the premier industrial supply house in the Northwest.

Faller explains why Stellar Industrial Supply views Unitrends as a smart technology investment. “Unitrends gives us the reliability and features we were looking for.”

In the future, Stellar Industrial Supply may be implementing site-to-site electronic vaulting. According to Faller, they are looking at vaulting their Unitrends backups using an offsite vaulting service, to further protect against disaster, and keep them competitive in the new decade.

"Our previous tape backup solution was not keeping up with our needs and we did not feel comfortable with the reliability of the previous backup software. We needed a quicker and more reliable backup solution that also had the ability to do bare metal restores to dissimilar hardware.  Unitrends gives us the reliability and features we were looking for."

"We did not want to pursue a backup solution that was not as proven as the Unitrends DPU."

"We are fortunate to have only had one server crash due to a bad software update….We restored the servers data and were up and running in 30 minutes."

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