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Honey, I shrunk the backup window - dramatically!

FremantleMedia Australia, Australia’s leading TV production, licensing and distribution company, has slashed its data backup window from 15 hours to 2-3 hours, and down to 90 minutes in some instances, by using ShadowProtect from StorageCraft.

Previously the company used ARCserve Backup.

FremantleMedia has production operations in 25 countries and programs are produced for more than 40 territories. Titles include Neighbours, So You Think You Can Dance, Australian Idol, and The Biggest Loser. The company’s Sydney office runs file and print servers under Windows 2003 across three locations. Most of the data comprises scripts and production details for shows, though there are also four Lotus Notes/Domino mail servers and a BlackBerry enterprise server.

IT Manager Alan Fear’s quest for a more comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) solution, plus reliable backup, ended when he evaluated ShadowProtect, which he describes as a simple and comprehensive solution for backup, recovery and disaster recovery.

The various databases are backed up Hewlett-Packard DL380 network-attached storage (NAS) devices running under Windows 2003 64-bit Storage Server. Each Image Repository stores up to 500GB of data.

“Using ShadowProtect Server we are able to achieve on-the-fly images for incremental backups, allowing us to restore files very quickly and efficiently,” said Alan Fear. “Previously we were backing up servers to tape using ARCserve Backup. It would take about 15 hours. Now we are doing disk-to-disk using ShadowProtect, our backup window has shrunk to between two and three hours. Some servers take only 90 minutes to back up.”

Optimum speeds hit 50-70 Mbit/second. StorageCraft’s support people helped to achieve these speeds by advising Alan to split images into smaller chunks, using ShadowProtect’s split-image file feature. This solved the problems Windows has in transferring large files over a LAN.

Alan said: “With help from StorageCraft we obtained maximum throughout to the NAS. They came up with a solution and we implemented it. We find their support people very helpful.”

FremantleMedia uses NetVault to push each backup to tape overnight for off-site archival of the backup images. The final phase of the company’s disaster recovery plan entails using ShadowProtect to restore images into a parallel environment for fast recovery. Tests show that this can be achieved in 15-20 minutes, sufficient speed to bring servers back online very quickly.

About StorageCraft

StorageCraft Technology Corporation provides innovative disk-based backup, disaster recovery, system migration, data protection and security solutions for servers, desktops and laptops. StorageCraft delivers software products that reduce downtime, improve security and stability for systems and data and lower the total cost of ownership for servers, desktops and laptops. www.storagecraft.com

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Source: Backup review