Ocean Nutrition Canada Eliminates Backup Window With AppAssure
World's largest supplier of Omega-3 switching from NovaStor
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on May 25, 2011 at 2:47 pmAppAssure Software announced that Ocean Nutrition Canada, the world’s largest supplier of Omega-3 EPA/DHA ingredients to dietary supplement and food manufacturing markets, has eliminated its backup window and achieved a comprehensive, virtualized disaster recovery plan after switching from NovaStor to AppAssure’s backup and recovery software, Replay 4.
The small six-member company’s IT team struggled for years with an old backup system that included NovaStor, NTBackup, and tape rotation. Rob Tyrrell, IT manager at Ocean Nutrition Canada, knew this process wasn’t keeping up with the needs of the company. "We would back up to tape then off site the tapes to a third party," notes Tyrrell. "We didn’t do incrementals, only full backups six nights a week, and then write off the tape at the end of week."
As Ocean Nutrition continued to expand, so did its backup window. "We’ve had huge data growth and infrastructure changes," says Tyrrell. "The backup window was becoming a problem. We had a tightly-orchestrated backup schedule to minimize interruptions of our users, particularly those outside of the North American time zones. But this meant we couldn’t change the schedule."
In a disaster recovery scenario, Tyrrell’s team knew they’d be in a big problem. "In a disaster, it would be a nightmare to recover even just our core services, much less any other systems," says Tyrrell. "It could literally be weeks before we could recover the core services. In some cases there was also no way to really perform a disaster recovery test, as it would literally begin with purchasing new hardware."
Tyrrell and his team convinced management that a change needed to happen in IT – from tape-to-disk imaging to a solution that gave them block-level, continuously protected, state-of-the-art backup and disaster recovery capabilities, such as Replay 4. "Nobody really thinks of IT until something breaks and this process exposed the gaps ahead of time. It was a unique experience, helping us adopt the system we have now with Replay."
Tyrrell and his team were impressed by Replay 4’s backup and disaster recovery capabilities:
- Live complete application protection
- Read/Write mountable snapshots
- Snapshots can be stored on a remote or removable disk drive
- Centralized monitoring and management of backups
- Block-based and granular snapshots
- Point in time restore capability
"We went from almost one end of the continuum to the other," says Tyrrell about the difference in using his old solution to using Replay. "We now have no backup window; our RPO and RTO are where we want them – minutes, not days. Before, we were looking at an eight-nightly hour backup window and an RPO/RTO in days or weeks. Basically, Replay has moved the company to the next step in protecting our information infrastructure."
In addition to now having the technology to meet growing IT backup needs, Ocean Nutrition also has a disaster recovery plan. "With VMware vSphere Backup, we’re replicating to another disaster recovery site," explains Tyrrell, "so that if our email server went down, we’d bring the virtual server into production and carry on. We’ve tested this with our core servers. We had users doing their work, and the staff didn’t even know they weren’t on the same servers as before."
All the checks are in place for Tyrrell and Ocean Nutrition. "You can warn people in advance about these things, but when it happens… it’s a disaster. We genuinely sleep better at night."