Case Study: Backup Pays Off for Systems & Methods, Inc.

Case Study: Wallenius Wilhelmsen Lines Americas

Case Study: Safe Data for Safeco Field

Case Study: UltraBac at Work for Mutual of Enumclaw

 

Case Study: Backup Pays Off for Systems & Methods, Inc.

UltraBac Enterprise Edition
Backing Up Child Support Payment Information for State and Local Governments
Opie Thompson, Network Administrator
Systems and Methods Inc.

The Challenge
Systems & Methods Inc. (SMI) supplies integrated hardware and software systems that help clients process information more efficiently and productively. SMI is a leader in information processing for state and local government human services agencies with a strong focus on systems for processing child support payments. Every SMI system incorporates precise data management capabilities and no-nonsense accountability that government agencies demand.

With the home office in Carrollton, Ga., and three other contract offices in Connecticut, North Carolina and Missouri, SMI ensures that intended recipients of child support payments receive money. In Connecticut, North Carolina and Missouri, the state governments are responsible for collecting child support payments and forwarding that money to the appropriate recipients. SMI handles the entire arrangement from beginning to end using its own Systems and Methods Automated Remittance Technology, or SMARTÔ solution. With these systems executing ongoing mission critical jobs, a dependable backup and disaster recovery solution was paramount.

The Situation
" The reality of not having a reliable backup and disaster recovery solution is more than just a scary thought for us," said Opie Thompson, network administrator at SMI. "The state governments we serve rely heavily on us to maintain important databases, so losing data is unacceptable."

SMI's child support management solution works like this: The spouse responsible for paying child support sends a check with a remittance form to SMI. SMI compiles the information from the check and remittance form into one image document and loads it into a database. The check is deposited into a government account and a receipt file is sent to the bank. Depending on the state, the state government or SMI issues the check and sends it to the spouse entitled to it.

"It's not uncommon for us to process 17-18,000 image files/transactions per site on a daily basis, so backups need to be fast," said Thompson. "We could run into a problem if backups are too slow. We'd end up processing new transactions while backing up the old ones and that absolutely can't happen."

This type of government solution required a robust backup system that could handle extremely large amounts of data on a daily basis, quickly and efficiently. SMI also needed the capability to recover this data at any time.

The Solution
SMI tried Computer Associates' ARCserve to solve its backup and disaster recovery needs, but had compatibility issues that didn't result in a reliable solution. The company also experimented with several other well-known backup products. After downloading a free live trial version and testing it, SMI chose UltraBac as the backbone for its backup and disaster recovery system.

SMI installed UltraBac Enterprise Edition backup and disaster recovery software on approximately 50 servers, roughly 12 at each location. Now SMI administrators run multiple nightly backups at each location. Data from state case workers compiled using SMI's proprietary software, as well as SQL database files and Microsoft files, are written to tape and disk and stored at offsite locations.

"There is not one megabyte of information on our servers that is not 100 percent crucial to our daily operations," said Thompson. "Part of the beauty of UltraBac's network disaster recovery tool is that we can quickly locate the backup from an entire server if necessary and restore it in a matter of minutes."

The Benefits
Thompson said UltraBac's reliability is its best feature, but fast backups and ease of operation run close seconds.

"Before UltraBac, we had to really nurse our backup system which meant working nights and weekends," said Thompson. "Now I can automate our entire backup and disaster recovery system and walk away, monitoring it periodically."

Thompson said his job has become easier with UltraBac because the solution creates a log describing the tasks it performed. It is also set to automatically e-mail Thompson to let him know the status of each server backup and whether any errors occurred during the process.

"Another key to good products is the people who support them," said Thompson. "UltraBac's sales staff and technical support team are exceptional. They are good at listening and comprehending challenges, and that helped us create a master game plan for our company's backup and recovery system. It's that kind of extra effort that makes new product implementations successful."

Software:
Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, NT Server, Advanced and Terminal Server
Unix Server
SQL Database
Visual Basic
Microsoft Office and Outlook (DOUBLECHECK)

Hardware:
Compaq servers with Intel processors

Case Study: Wallenius Wilhelmsen Lines Americas

UltraBac
Keeping Information Services Afloat
Kevin Whitney, Network Administrator
Wallenius Wilhelmsen (Americas Region)

The Challenge
Wallenius Wilhelmsen Lines Americas, LLC (WWLA) is the world's largest ocean transportation provider for vehicles or machinery that can be rolled on and off ocean vessels. It specializes in the transportation of cars, agricultural and construction machinery, boats, and project cargo. In addition to ocean transportation, the Scandinavian-owned carrier offers logistics management, vehicle processing, terminal management and stevedoring, and land transportation services.

The information WWLA stores in its databases and other parts of its technology infrastructure is not information that is easily duplicated or reentered. In many cases, the company captures live transactions, such as EDI transactions, details of customer histories and other proprietary services. Information technology staff members said WWLA would be devastated even by a minimal data loss.

"It is just plain unacceptable for us to lose data," said Kevin Whitney, network administrator at WWLA. "We need to feel comfortable and secure with the backup and disaster recovery solution we use."

The Situation
WWLA operates 59 individual Windows NT servers. Of these servers, 20 run Microsoft Exchange Server, several others run Microsoft SQL Server and the others run a variety of other in-house applications and data management programs.

Approximately 25 of these servers are located at remote office sites scattered across the United States. These remote office sites, which house customer service, sales and operations representatives, do not have IT personnel in-house to remedy any problems that may occur with data loss. Therefore, it was imperative that the backup and disaster recovery solution WWLA chose be reliable without requiring continual, manual oversight.

"Because our IT staff supports a large portion of the company's information technology infrastructure remotely, data loss or crashed servers caused by buggy and unreliable software can cause particularly serious problems for us," said Whitney.

The Solution
After investing in approximately 15 copies of another type of backup software, WWLA determined it needed a more reliable solution. The company chose UltraBac as its permanent tool for backup and disaster recovery. IT staff now enjoy the peace of mind that a dependable backup and disaster recovery software program brings.

Using UltraBac, WWLA routinely backs up Microsoft Exchange databases; Microsoft SQL databases; proprietary data from in-house applications; Word, Excel, and Power Point documents and other miscellaneous applications and associated data. IT staff simply instruct the solution to run full back ups every day and sit back and relax.

UltraBac's network disaster recovery tool also allows WWLA administrators to recover any data lost due to outside forces at the push of a button. By executing UltraBac's restore technology, WWLA data can be retrieved easily in a matter of minutes.

The Benefits
Whitney said UltraBac is simple to install, operate and administer. That allowed his staff members to implement the solution quickly, as well as manage it without needing to maintain a continual hands-on approach.

"UltraBac's notification features give us daily updates regarding any problems with backups and the general health of our system," said Whitney. "The capability to quickly restore data and simply check the status of a backup and walk away to do other things, has saved us valuable time and man-hours we'd otherwise have to devote to manually monitoring our system."

Software:
Windows NT 4.0 Server
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft SQL Server

Hardware:
Intel processors
Compaq Servers

Case Study: Safe Data for Safeco Field

Backup software was an essential tool in Safeco Field construction.

Keeping a system running smoothly in adverse conditions is a special challenge - just ask Larry Douglas! General contractor Hunt-Kiewit Joint Venture assigned the computer guru that task during the construction of the Seattle Mariners' new Safeco Field.

Douglas was perpetually on call, handling all computer-related tasks. He researched, bought, and installed software and hardware; provided tech support; fixed glitches; trained employees; and programmed a little when necessary.

Hard Hats and Hard Drives
Douglas' task was to maintain business continuity in a fast-changing, temporary work site. His system had more than 200 workstations and five Windows NT® servers. Because of the vast amount of record keeping involved in such a huge project, and the unique hazards a construction site poses to computer equipment, Douglas ranked reliable backup and disaster recovery as a #1 priority.

Dependable performance by a server containing critical information could make the difference in whether concrete got poured or steel went up on time within budget. Even though each server had an uninterruptible power supply to protect from unreliable power, the construction site's special threats of dust, water and vibration caused severe problems. In this environment, "you are going to lose equipment," he said.

Reliable Retrieval
When the stadium project started, Douglas was using ARCserve from Computer Associates. Due to software reliability problems and technical support issues, he decided he couldn't depend on ARCserve.

After researching new products including Microsoft backup, he chose UltraBac, finding it clean, speedy and able to automatically back up open shared files. With comparable features, lower costs and a money back guarantee, "that made the decision right there," according to Douglas.

UltraBac provides a backup, storage management and disaster recovery system. The software has garnered praise for offering faster backup and retrieval, using less memory and disk, and being easier to use than competitors' products. UltraBac is scalable and was designed expressly for Windows NT, 2000 and XP.

Douglas made the switch just before the company moved. This occurred over two weekends, requiring all equipment and applications to be up and running each Monday morning. "I had to have something very dependable," he said.

The conversion was quick. He estimates his own purchase order took longer to get than it took to download the product. After 30-minutes of training, Douglas successfully backed up his system on the first night, and thanks to the logical design of the software, barely cracked the user's manual after that.

At first Douglas frequently spot-checked tapes to make sure he could restore, but after not finding any problems he backed off to checking only occasionally. "It operates so nicely, you essentially forget that it's there." He did however install all upgrades.

From the first backup, Douglas saw timesavings. He estimates UltraBac is one-third faster than ARCserve. UltraBac also paid off in crises - letting him find and restore needed files. "That's proof that this thing works," he said. Fortunately, he never had to test UltraBac's Disaster Recovery Feature - it restores a lost system from tape without reloading NT or any other software.

By the time the Mariners threw the first pitch on Safeco Field, Douglas had moved on to his next project, happy with his UltraBac experience. Douglas noted, "The only safety net you have is a backup."

Case Study: UltraBac at Work for Mutual of Enumclaw

Mutual of Enumclaw deploys UltraBac with Image backup over the company network.

the problem
For any business, computing downtime is heavily frowned on and impacts the bottom line. Mutual of Enumclaw (MoE), a provider of insurance services, is no exception. Access to information for employees and agents is critical and the success of the company depends on the continued availability of information. In a crisis, MoE administrators need to be able to return servers downed by data loss or hard disk crashes to production ready status.

the solution
Implement UltraBac Stand Alone Recovery and Image backup. One example: During a recent Service Pack installation - at 50% complete - the server crashed. The operator simply removed the system disk from its drive bay and replaced it with the standby 'UltraBac' NT Image disk drive and re-booted the server. The Windows NT Server was back to the exact state (Production ready) prior to beginning the installation of the Service Pack. "Stand Alone Recovery creates a static mirror image every night on every server. UltraBac helps me sleep at night," reports John Weeks, the NT Project Manager at MoE.

UltraBac's Stand Alone Recovery & Image backup can backup a NT operating system partition without shutting down the server.
" Before making any changes to any server, we run an Image backup of the system volume disk. Then we implement the change. With the UltraBac safety net in place, we can always go back to the original disk state. More importantly, we don't waste valuable IT resources," says Weeks.

the benefits
By replacing mirroring with UltraBac's Image backup, MoE was able to eliminate the potential for corruption on their mirrored drives. Further, they no longer have system overhead associated with operating mirroring 24 hours a day. Their IT staff can simply run the Image backup at a scheduled time. Their system disk images are safe, secure and available when they need to access them. Also, UltraBac quickly executes a 4GB disk-to-disk images backup in under 9 minutes.

Mutual of Enumclaw's IT Division operates 60 NT servers and provides services to over 1500 employees and agents from their Terminal Server / Citrix Metaframe platforms. The backup strategy involves a combination of backups to DLT 7000 tape drives, 7-slot autoloaders and disk-to-disk images backups of each NT Server. UltraBac performs backups in less than 4 hours. "The compression rate of our backups with UltraBac is awesome!" says Ron Fenili, Network Administrator.

When asked about UltraBac's restore from tape?
John Weeks reported, "It works great. It was fast, simple and painless! UltraBac's unique Express Index feature enables us to search our disk indexes and the restore is started in less than five minutes."

UltraBac, the award-winning Enterprise Storage Management Solution, delivers flexible, easy-to-use, high performance backup and disaster recovery protection for your company's mission critical data. Our wide variety of product options makes it easy to scale complete protection as your company's data and business requirements grow.

At ORBiT Software and UltraBac we focus on customer service and providing you with the ultimate in Windows backup!

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