Case Study: Gemini Group Opts for Altaro

• Company locations: Carlisle, Cumbria in England and Dumfries in Scotland
• Industries served: Education, public sector, and businesses
• No of Employees: 30
• Number of Hosts Managed: 80

Providing offsite backup services and storage helps Gemini Group fulfill its mission as a fully managed IT support service with 24/7 monitoring, saving the day for numerous customers. Ratcliffe gives a recent example of how Altaro Software Ltd helps the company achieve this.

“Customers love the fact they can perform offsite backups to our offices, and that these are fully encrypted,” he says.

Saving the day for customers
“We had one issue where a server had gone down for an estate agency which was a customer of ours,” he recalls. “However, thanks to Altaro and the fact the agency performed its offsite backups to us, we were able to restore the data to dissimilar hardware and then restore to that server. We were then able to go to the site with the server fully restored and had them up and working within 3 hours.“

He adds: “Our backup customers love the fact that they can perform real test restores onto servers we have here. We can then issue certificates to companies and then can be 100% confident that their backups are working and can be used if ever needed.“

Manageability thanks to Altaro’s multi-tenant management console
Customer service and attention to detail is critical to Gemini. The multi-tenant cloud management console (CMC) that forms an integral part of Altaro VM Backup for MSPs helps Gemini deliver on this by making it possible to view everything through a single pane of glass.

“Altaro’s CMC makes it extremely easy to monitor and manage all our customers’ installations, perform operations such as backups and restores, and configure schedules for clients,” Ratcliffe states. “Our single biggest reason to recommend Altaro is in fact its manageability. We love being able to manage and monitor all our clients from one console.“

Storage space savings of 89.27%
Another plus is Altaro’s augmented inline deduplication.

“From our CMC we can see that thanks to Altaro, we are making storage space saving of 89.27%.“

Looking back to when Gemini first switched to Altaro, Ratcliffe says: “We were using a different backup solution which was causing nothing but issues backing up VMs. After exhausting every avenue with that, we tried Altaro and within 1 hour we had a full successful backup of the VM we tested it on. From then on we didn’t look back.

Confident that the backup is robust
Altaro is a staple in Gemini’s portfolio for various reasons.

“It is very speedy to install and very easy to configure the backup schedules, backup locations, and so on. Restoring from backups – full VM, virtual disk restore and granular restore – is a breeze and we can be fully confident that the backup is robust and easy to use,” Ratcliff states.

Another plus is the Altaro team’s accessibility, pleasant approach and 24/7 support: “Altaro are very easy and pleasant to speak to and get in contact with. Their support is second to none and the live chat within the program itself is invaluable,” he enthuses. “The support team are always quick, polite and willing to help.“