Hallite Removes Four Hour Delay in Data Recovery

Hallite Seals International, a provider of hydraulic and pneumatic seals to the global fluid power industry, has purchased a suite of disaster recovery products and services from MSP DataFort Ltd. to ensure that excessive downtime is avoided and company information is protected, thereby preventing the 24/7 manufacturer from losing vital production time.

Replacing a time-consuming and unreliable backup process based upon on-site tape backup and large capacity disk drives, Hallite has contracted for DataFort’s Hi-5 High Availability Service – a near replication speed onsite/offsite server imaging and data archival service – to protect Hallite’s most business critical server which holds the ERP system. They also have subscribed to Vaulting Plus a service which for a fixed price includes onsite/offsite server imaging and data archival but with a slower Recovery Time Objective – to protect the remaining servers that host less business critical applications.

The old tape-based backup process was liable to require a minimum of four hours to recover Hallite’s data and return the manufacturing company to operational status, which represented a serious loss of productivity for the 200+ employees and far exceeded Hallite’s maximum tolerable outage (MTO). However, with DataFort’s services, the 24/7 manufacturer is able to exceed its RTO and can be assured of ERP service within as little as 15 minutes.

Jim Parker, Information Technology Manager at Hallite comments: "Being a 24/7 operation it is critical for us to have a disaster recovery capability in place that enables us to recover any and all data immediately and return us to full operation as rapidly as possible. We work literally every hour available so do not have the luxury of being able to make up time elsewhere in the week, making effective and reliable disaster recovery and business continuity an absolute necessity."

Parker continues: "Prior to implementing the DataFort solution, we were relying on a manual data backup which consisted of manually replacing and cycling tapes and a USB hard drive. Retrieving the data in the case of a disaster could take hours, and since the backups happened nightly they could be as much as 24 hours out of date. In order to minimise disruption and cost to our business, we needed to be able to return to operation within an hour and have access to data that was created throughout the day. DataFort’s portfolio of services exceeded even those strict requirements as it will now take us a maximum of 15 minutes to return to operation and we will have a copy of all our data that in a worst case is a quarter of an hour old."

Parker concludes: "I know some business people imprudently consider high quality and reliable disaster recovery a ‘nice-to-have’ or a luxury, but for a company such as ours speedy recovery is an absolute necessity and a business function that simply has to be taken seriously."