Sage South Africa Explains How Redstor Helped to Resolve Backup and Storage Challenges Challenges

Sage South Africa (Pty) Ltd., in accounting and business management software development, is a specialist in business software solutions across accounting, payroll, human resources, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and business intelligence.

The organisation was in operation as Softline from 1988 until it was acquired by the The Sage Group Plc in 2013 changing its name to Sage South Africa.

Challenge
The challenge facing Sage South Africa was in resolving the length of time required to do its backups. The company had to backup 18 products per day, consisting of brochure sites and web application servers. These are located on their hosted environment across two locations and includes 32 servers at a volume of 1.8TB. They also had to use multiple backup tools across an internet connection and the result was that backups were slow, prone to errors and complex to manage.

“The process of backing up the Sage systems prior to the Redstor solution was lengthy and frustrating,” explains Dominic Parkes, senior systems consultant, Sage South Africa. “Previously errors were commonplace and we had to manually see where the issue was located and then repair it. If the backup had failed, we had to redo the entry from scratch. The entire process, which has to be done every day, also took longer than 24 hours each time and this, of course, had a knock-on effect as we battled to keep up and be entirely protected against data loss.“

To remain compliant with both internal and external policies, the organisation has to ensure backups are done regularly, storage is secure and accessible, a reliable DR system is in place and that all backup and storage parameters are met. They had to find a way of overcoming the challenges presented by the former solution to create a backup process which was quick and easy to manage.

Sage South Africa had a unique challenge in that they had multiple backup tools they had to use each time, and all data had to be transmitted over an Internet line. When they had to do a complete audit or restore it was extremely time consuming as they had to restore an entire file which was located on a different server. They needed something simple which worked with systems they already had in place so Redstor opted for the installation and management of Redstor Backup Pro. The solution was tailored to fit the specific requirements of Sage South Africa and addressed each one of the issues which had made backup life so complex and frustrating.

Solution
Redstor Backup Pro (previously Attix5 Pro) being one of the fastest commercial backup clients with its scalable attributes proved to be the fit for Sage. It provides a tool for multi-terabyte deployment across multiple geographic areas. The solution has allowed for Sage South Africa to move from using a number of tools to just one, simplifying backup and storage processes.

Redstor’s solution has been deployed onto a shared platform as the back-end which runs throughout the business. Sage South Africa is running backups from two locations to one shared platform which is located offsite and is more secure. The new set-up allows for the business to monitor data on the backup server at any time so they always know what to expect and can assess potential problems. All aspects of the platform can be managed from one central, easy to use, console which can be accessed from anywhere using a secured login.

The Redstor Backup solution is hardware and network agnostic so there was no need for the customer to invest in new back-end technology or servers. It is flexible and easy to install with single port access across the network.

Parkes agrees: “Switching to LAN has sped up the process. Backups are now done in an hour compared with up to 24 hours spent before and everything has been simplified. Now I can log onto the console, see what is going on straight away, assess how the servers are doing and catch issues which would have gone unnoticed in the past.“

Result
“The solution has simplified our backups with reduced man hours, a lot less effort and much less stress,” says Parkes. “We believe that the time savings alone are worth the investment. Where it would take us around five hours per week to complete a certain task, it now takes us 30 minutes.“

The customer has found that they are a lot more confident in the backups, knowing that they can rely on them should any issues arise.

“Now when we need to collect or restore data we are able to trust in the system and the restore itself is remarkably quick and efficient,” says Parkes. “The turnaround for the business is much better than it was – with the old system we would have had to pull the backup file down, restore the data to a local drive, copy the files across and only then would we be done. Now we have the data from server to a specified location in ten minutes. I can also do a restore from the server using my Redstor console, which is something I’ve never been able to do before.“

Sage South Africa still backups from their 18 products on their hosted environment across two locations and 32 servers, but instead of hours the backups take minutes. Due to the flexible nature of Redstor’s cloud backup solution it is ready to scale with their business’ requirements.

“Support from Redstor has been amazing,” concludes Parkes. “If any anomalies are detected, I am contacted immediately to ask me if I have seen the issue and if I need any help. It is prompt and fantastic and now that I have more time, I am able to focus on other pending business issues, rather than repetitive checking of slow backups.“