Secure-24 Protects Data With EMC Disk Library

EMC Corporation announced that Secure-24, Inc., provider of managed hosting, disaster recovery, and managed services to large and mid-sized organizations, has standardized its data backup operations on an EMC virtual tape library solution to increase the speed and efficiency of its rapidly growing backup operations.

Volker Straub, Secure-24’s Chief Operating Officer, said: "We have experienced steady growth year after year based on our success with delivering peace of mind to our customers. Companies outsource their highly critical applications to us so they can reduce their operational costs, achieve compliance more successfully, and fast-forward key projects. EMC’s scaleable and flexible infrastructure has helped us grow by enabling us to efficiently and reliably support customers around the globe with cutting edge SLAs."

Based in Southfield, Mich., Secure-24 selected EMC Disk Library 4200 and EMC NetWorker software as its virtual tape library (VTL) solution over other vendors including NetApp. The company utilizes an EMC CLARiiON CX infrastructure to help manage mission-critical ERP applications, such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics. EMC supports Secure-24’s hosted customer environments as well as its internal operations at Secure-24 datacenters across the U.S.

"We made a strategic decision to strengthen the scalability and flexibility of our storage environment, especially as our backup environment increased 7-fold in just the past year alone," said Scott McIsaac, Secure-24’s Storage Lead. "We evaluated solutions from other vendors, including NetApp, but found that we really liked EMC’s reporting, backup speed and overall usability. EMC’s virtual tape library was more mature and really enhanced our process flow."

Secure-24 standardized its physical and virtual tape operations on the EMC Disk Library and NetWorker. The EMC Disk Library has increased Secure-24’s backup capacity by an average of 67 percent and reduced backup time by 43 percent.

"We’ve lowered our TCO," said McIsaac. "We need less storage for backups and EMC’s solution is a much more automated, reliable process so we’re also saving staff time."

Before deploying the EMC VTL, Secure-24 engaged EMC Global Services to analyze its backup environment and recommended various options for improving backup performance, reliability and efficiency. EMC also shared best practices for deploying and running VTL operations.

McIsaac noted: "Working with EMC Global Services sped up the process of identifying opportunities to increase the efficiency of our backup environment. Incorporating EMC’s recommendations not only improved the quality of our implementation, but we’ve retooled our backup environment for greater scalability and more efficient growth."

To support customers with high data availability requirements, Secure-24 relies on EMC MirrorView software to replicate data across geographically dispersed datacenters. MirrorView has enabled Secure-24 to deliver disaster recovery and business continuity services with a lower RTO (Recovery Time Objective). Additionally, Secure-24 used VMware virtualization software to consolidate and protect its servers as virtual machines residing on CLARiiON.

Straub said: "As a certified SAP hosting partner, we’re expected to satisfy the demand for the highest levels of performance, reliability and scalability in SAP environments. We standardized on EMC so we can provide our SAP and other clients with access to the industry’s most advanced technologies for data replication, storage, backup and virtualization."

McIsaac added: "EMC is a name that all our clients can stand behind. It’s been very stable for us and has helped us grow. We’ve leveraged EMC technology for nine years and we have never had an outage."