Datastore365 Provides the Saints With CDP From Asigra
Northampton Saints go marching on.
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on January 22, 2008 at 3:53 pmAsigra Inc. announced that its online backup and recovery software is being deployed by Datastore365 for Northampton Saints RFC. Datastore365 carries out automated backups on a continual basis for Northampton Saints, primarily to protect the Club’s sensitive and critical data, including video analysis (researching the opposition’s tactics and training the players), retail data from the two stadium shops, emails, all files including players’ contracts and medical records, and accounting data.
Having experienced a major data loss two years ago that directly affected the Club’s business, the Saints needed to ensure that in the event of a systems failure this information would be protected and quickly restorable to allow for business continuity. The Club realized that this would require ditching its laborious and unreliable tape-based backup solution and moving over to an automated and online system that would allow the fast retrieval of lost data with minimal disruption to the business.
Brian Facer, Head of Marketing at Northampton Saints, said: “Nobody ever believes a disaster will happen to them, but when it does it can cripple your business and you need to be ready. We experienced a major IT disaster first hand in 2005 and lost data critical to the running of the club, which spurred us on to move from corrupt and manual tape-based backup – which had proved to be unreliable, slow and open to human errors – to online backup with Datastore365 using Asigra’s software which is automated, reliable and we can restore our data within minutes if needed. Datastore365 – working with its local partner, acs office solutions – now supports us in every area of IT and every time we have given Datastore365 a task it has been fulfilled, giving me the peace of mind and freedom to enjoy and focus on my core role for the Saints.”
Ali Hepher, European Cup winning player and now Head of Technical Analysis at Northampton Saints, said: “Being a household name but operating as a relatively small business it is inevitable that our systems will malfunction from time to time, but we need to be able to protect the data that resides on these systems as it is critical to serving our fans and business partners. With the Datastore365 backup service we no longer have to worry about our data and can concentrate on our jobs without interruption. Furthermore, we are moving more and more of our processes from paper to digital, particularly in our analysis and player monitoring. I feel confident now about moving towards additional digital automation because of the data protection system we have in place with Datastore365 and Asigra.”
The level of granularity the software allows in the restoration of the data suits Northampton Saints. A backup set for instance can include a whole server, share/volume, directory or even a single file. Should the Saints just lose just one email for instance, this can be restored individually without having to restore an entire server.
Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, commented: “Northampton Saints RFC is well aware that there is no point in backing up data if you’re uncertain as to whether you can restore it. For a time-sensitive business like a leading professional rugby club, it is essential that this data can also be restored quickly. Asigra Televaulting speeds backup and restore processes by only including unique data that has not been previously stored, saving time, costs and storage needs for a more efficient means of disaster recovery and by providing a copy of the backup on local storage.”
Datastore365 is backing up 120GB of stored data from three Windows 2003 servers, including an Active Directory server, a Microsoft Exchange SQL server and a general file server. The data center is based in Brackmills industrial estate in Northampton. For additional protection of the data, the data is mirrored to a second Datastore365 data center based in the old US Airforce base at Greenham Common, Berkshire, just in case the primary data center should fail. The data is generated from four different locations in and around the stadium, due to the diverse nature of the business, so it is advantageous that the backup is centralized.
Gary Witts, director of Datastore365, said: “The Saints came to us with specific backup and recovery requirements and the flexibility and quality of Asigra Televaulting has enabled us to achieve these. In addition, Asigra’s technology has an agentless architecture, which enabled us to integrate the service into Northampton Saints’ existing system with minimal fuss, as well as minimizing management costs.”
The Saints also benefits from Asigra’s bare metal restore (BMR) solution, which will allow Datastore365 to quickly recover lost, damaged or corrupted data in a highly streamlined fashion to any bare metal system without having to manually reinstall operating systems or to configure hardware prior to use. Datastore365 can restore the complete system on new hardware – regardless of manufacturer – including local data, user profiles, registry/system state, service pack files and encrypted files.
How the Backup works
At Northampton Saints’ headquarters, Franklin’s Gardens, a single Asigra Televaulting DS-Client discovers all servers, desktops and laptops connected to the local network, and automates the backup of all local data assets. The software is totally agentless, requiring no additional software to be installed on any machines to enable backup. Before the backup data set is transmitted to the Datastore365 data centers, the Asigra Televaulting software analyzes the data, finds new and changed file blocks from the previous backup, eliminates duplicate files and further compresses the residue bytes to ensure the backup set is as compact as possible. The software then encrypts the data before sending it over an IP- WAN connection to a centralized Asigra Televaulting DS-System server, located in Datastore365’s primary data center, which consolidates the backup data. Data is encrypted in-flight and at-rest.
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