Bright 3D Moves to StorageCraft

StorageCraft Technology Corporation announced details of a project at Bright3D that is helping to protect systems from disruption using business continuity features.

Bright 3D is a team of designers and project managers who deliver inspirational visitor experiences for a range of national and international clients including The National Trust, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Oman Botanic Gardens.

Edinburgh based Bright 3D was founded in 2007. Without a dedicated IT department, the new firm turned to OneStop ITS Ltd to help set-up and manage its new IT systems. Although Bright 3D had originally used tape backup to protect its critical systems, the sheer growth of data and the ability to archive client work was starting to become a cumbersome process open to human error.

With a move to a new building in 2008, the firm approached OneStop with a requirement for an IT refresh as well as a more efficient business continuity strategy. OneStop initially used StorageCraft ShadowProtect to create clones of each server. These acted as both an initial backup point and served as the basis for the migration. ShadowProtect was then installed on the main file server which takes a backup of critical data every 15 minutes.

This backup data is then copied onto a removable disk drive which is rotated every day with an identical unit that is then stored off-site at a secure location. With this low cost approach, there is always a complete real-time copy of the entire Bright3D dataset on the local drive with another full copy from the previous day also available on site. While a third ‘safety copy’ is held off site. Bright3D is now considering switching to hosted off-site backup offered by OneStop via a broadband connection using ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise instead of removable disks.

In the event of a minor file loss or server failure, ShadowProtect can recover individual files or rebuild servers. In the event of a major site disruption such as fire, theft or flood, the offsite ‘safety copy’ allows OneStop to rebuild the Bright3D infrastructure onto new hardware if needed.

Bright 3D have not had to evoke a full server rebuild but it did have a recent issue where two PC’s were infected by a computer virus. Using ShadowProtect, the firm was able to recover a large number of files that would have otherwise been lost when both machines became unusable. Following the incident, Bright3D is now evaluating extending ShadowProtect backup to include its end user PC’s.

"OneStop have delivered a great service for us over the last few years," comments James Simpson, Senior Designer for Bright 3D, "The backup process that we now have in place requires very little management and has helped us recover critical files whenever the need has arisen."