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Greystone Financial Uses Cost-Effective Unitrends Solutions to Meet Escalating Data Requirements
Industry > Finance
Challenges
- Increasing amount of business data to protect dealing with billions of dollars in assets
- Shrinking backup windows
- Increasing difficulty getting data off-site for added security
- Limited budget
Solution
Unitrends DPUs and DPV
Results
- Higher level of data protection
- Rapid backup and restore
- Higher reliability and lower data loss risk
- Ability to recover files from central location
At Greystone Financial, like many other organizations, the amount of corporate-critical data to be preserved grows daily. The data is crucial, dealing with billions of dollars in assets.
"We employed a complete tape backup solution, using SDLT tape drives with Veritas Backup Exec," said Ned Howard, Greystone's Information Technology manager. "The SDLT drives enable us to back up as much as half of a terabyte of information on a tape on direct-attached drives, performing a full backup every night during the work week. It was working, but it was not working well, and we saw the potential for significant problems coming down the line very quickly. For instance, we were able to backup our data, but each full backup took as much as 12 hours to complete. It didn't allow us to migrate the data off-site to our data recovery center on a nightly basis with ease."
Challenge > Rapid Business-Critical Data Growth Demands Total Solution
More importantly, Howard and other members of his team knew that as Greystone's data load continued to get bigger, their backup windows would continue to shrink, and the organization's hardware and software requirements would keep escalating.
"We needed a cost-effective solution that would grow with us, and we needed it to be consistent with a fully-implemented data protection strategy...we needed far more than just backup and restore," Howard commented.
Solution > Unitrends Data Protection Units and Data Protection Vault
Greystone considered many solutions to its data protection challenges; it quickly realized that given its limited budget, many of the solutions were neither cost effective nor feasible. As Howard and his team looked further, they also realized that tape-based data protection might not offer the full solution Greystone needed.
"We needed a solution that would not only backup our data, but would also replicate it to an off-site location for use in the event of a disaster," Howard said. "We quickly realized we needed a completely new approach; just incrementally upgrading our hardware or software would not meet our needs."
Working with a trusted integration partner, Greystone discovered that Unitrends and its Data Protection Unit offered it a full range of choices that would help safeguard critical data and systems, with the Hot Bare Metal™ recovery feature.
"It's one thing to be able to recover a lost file," said Howard. "But we knew that if an entire computer or server went down it would be hours or even days before we could reboot and recover the information. Greystone simply could not afford that kind of downtime." He said the Hot Bare Metal™ ability to help users recover crashed operating systems in as little as 15 minutes was a key benefit, offered by virtually no other firm.
Results > A Higher Level of Protection
Meanwhile, Unitrends' Data Protection Units also moved Greystone to a higher level of information protection. The DPU's true disk-to-disk capabilities enabled Howard to back up his data far more rapidly than with tape; restores were even accomplished within minutes, instead of the hours that can be required to catalog and search tapes for a single file. "We could just FTP to the off-site location and pull the file back quickly without hassle. We were also able to slash our backup time and gain more benefits, since we could also 'sync' the data to an off-site location, as well as just backing it up." Howard also used a Unitrends' DPV (Data Protection Vault) that provided significant benefits, giving him the ability to back off key data from remote locations to a central site.
"And the fact that if needed we could remove the target hard disks from the DPVs and DPUs, and move them off-site to one location, closed the deal," Howard said. "Taken together, Unitrends offered us the most complete solution available at a price that we could justify," concludes Howard.