Clients' Case Studies

 

When staff from AEGIS venture into IT Manager Jeremy Moeder’s office at their London headquarters after a data loss incident, they always find reassurance in Jeremy as they put on a brave face in hopes of retrieving their lost files. “I perform minor restores nearly every day, and still, people are always amazed how I have already started recovering their lost files before they have finished explaining to me what happened."

Before settling on Databarracks as his Backup provider, Jeremy experimented with tapes as well as other smaller online backup solutions. Generally, other solutions Jeremy evaluated tended to be insufficient; often hitting storage limits, failing, taking too long, being unreliable, and all around just not providing the perfect fit for AEGIS’ Enterprise level backup needs.

“Databarracks is the best total package for online backup. The Arxcis Asigra software is a leader on the market because it is more professional and user friendly. The automated archiving and MLR features as well as remote connection to the data centre have really helped to make minor restores quick and easy. Plus, because the software is fully automated and runs in the background, it is virtually unnoticeable and allows work to go on without interruption,” Jeremy comments.

 “Databarracks acts as if they are my team, and monitor everything to do with the backups for me. Their assistance gives me more time to concentrate on additional IT matters. They do all the driving, I just sit back and watch!”

A telephone call Jeremy received one day informed him that users at AEGIS were unable to login to their email. Once the problem had been investigated, it was revealed that one of the three disks in the email server’s RAID, had failed, then, in turn, each of the remaining disks failed as well. In trying to repair itself, the entire array had been corrupted, which instigated the problem.

Jeremy contacted Dell, asking for new drives, which were delivered by 7pm that night. Once the drives had arrived, the rebuilding of the server commenced, though the task was not completed until nearly 12 hours later. Jeremy endured some gruelling work that night, as he alternated work and sleep to complete the rebuilding process. In the morning, once the server was rebuilt and ready for the data to be restored, one of Databarracks’ senior engineers was onsite with a hard copy of the data to be transferred to the new server.

“The Databarracks’ technician was fantastic! He stayed with me through the entire restore process. The engineer was available every step of the way. We were able to restore the database, while keeping the e-mails functional. It was the perfect solution, as everything went ahead smoothly and we achieved complete recovery,” recalls Jeremy.

Given that AEGIS is the leader in the industry of security and risk management, and that their data is the lifeblood of their organisation, due to it containing valuable details used in their various analysis procedures, it is understandable that they would expect their data to be treated with the same discretion and integrity that their clients demand of them. Databarracks helps AEGIS uphold the maintenance of accurate and complete records they require.

Emails, which suffered the brunt of the impact when their RAID went down, are vital to AEGIS. The communication channel created by email unifies all players participating in various operations, including clients, potential clients, countless employees on-location worldwide, and those stationed in the company’s offices in London, Kabul, Baghdad, Manama, and Washington DC. Much historical data about events and issues as well as specifications for current projects are contained in emails between AEGIS and their clients. Losing access to these emails would eliminate the ability to review these records for reference when the need arose. 

“Having an encryption key that only I hold ensures that my data is just being stored and is unable to be accessed by anyone else, which lets me rest easy that confidential information will remain private. In addition, by keeping the data in an unbeatable location, like the Bunker, I am convinced that our data is in one of the most secure places it could possibly be,” Jeremy comments. The acknowledgement of the Bunker, the ISO 27001 certified Tier 4 ex-NATO bunker located outside the M25, where Databarracks hosts clients’ vaults, adds merit to the security of the solution.

 

How Databarracks Keeps Golf Coach Damian Taylor’s Data Accessible

 

Email communication is of the utmost importance to WTB as a means of maintaining the high standard of Customer Service and flexibility they offer. Much communication involving critical details is done between employees and their customers as well as with suppliers. In March of 2007, WTB decided to use Databarracks to provide fully managed online backup services in order to safeguard nearly 3 Terabytes of their valuable emails, databases, and files on 21 servers. Databarracks employs Asigra software to safeguard WTB’s data. The functions of the software that are currently utilised for the account are the local storage, archiving, and backup lifecycle management capabilities.

On Wednesday, 23 January 2008, Disaster struck at WTB. A SAN with one Terabyte of data and eight virtual servers experienced massive problems. Tim Brice, IT Systems Manager for WTB recalls, “The situation continued to worsen throughout the morning, with blue screens of death appearing on several virtual servers hosted on the SAN and key databases losing data and becoming corrupted. In the end we made the decision to rebuild the SAN volume group, rebuild the virtual machines and restore data and configurations from backup.”

At approximately 12 noon, restoration efforts and the rebuilding of machines began. That afternoon, Databarracks was contacted for help.  Within four hours, two of Databarracks most senior engineers were on site with data necessary for recovery which they had collected from the Data Centre en-route. The engineers stayed through the night, doing everything in their power to assist with the recovery.

“I was amazed at the service we received, as the engineers were wonderful! They acted professionally and were in good spirits all night, which helped to raise our morale. You don’t expect people to come out immediately and stay working until morning, but they did! It felt like Databarracks were part of our IT team. They were with us every step of the way as a safety net and really helped us get through this difficult time,” reveals Laura Smith, the Helpdesk manager who was involved in the recovery efforts. Databarracks’ devoted staff achieved recovery of sufficient systems to enable WTB to be up and running the following day. 

Overall, the disaster hindered the normal flow of business quite significantly for more than half of WTB’s 1,000 internal users. One SAN failure resulted in impact across servers designated for their Exchange and SQL in addition to other data being lost. As WTB performs vital business transactions via electronic messages, sending and receiving an average of 25,000 emails every day in addition to the millions of archived historical communications they maintain, the loss of Exchange functionality was no small problem. The corruption impacted the largest of three Exchange Servers which hosts 400 users, containing 50% of the estate of around 600GB. Included in the loss were mailboxes used for electronic ordering as well as those belonging to senior level management. In addition to Exchange, half of WTB’s user profiles were wiped out, resulting in hundreds of employees being unable to log on to the company system.

“Because half of office based users and all remote users were without Email, we obviously missed out on important correspondence with business partners including potential customers. In addition, business operations were severely impacted by having fifty percent of users unable to access the systems and several key applications unavailable. Luckily, we were able to run with much higher availability the following day. The resulting delays and costs would have been much worse if Databarracks had not acted so quickly” summarised Tim.

In the days following the disaster at WTB, efforts had to be made to recover additional historical data and further reinstate working order. Databarracks had the same two engineers, working in shifts 24 hours a day, retrieving data from the data centre and restoring it to WTB’s systems through the weekend.

Introduction

The London Oncology Clinic (LOC) offers outstanding services in the field of cancer treatment, using the latest technology as a key tool in treating, supporting and caring for its patients. Established in 2005 and based in London’s Harley Street, the clinic operates at the cutting-edge of medical treatment, with internationally acclaimed doctors aiming to deliver the highest standards of healthcare to each individual patient.

LOC’s challenge: The battle against time
One of the biggest challenges for any healthcare organisations is the retrieval and fast access of patient notes and related information in a secure and timely fashion. Without full records and up-to-date treatment information, a doctor is unable to make an informed decision on the best possible treatment and care for a patient.

Keeping all patient records and information online means that secure backup, storage, retrieval and fast access of the clinic’s information is of major importance.

The LOC’s medical records are completely electronic. It stores a large amount of structured data, as well as unstructured data in the form of jpg and tiff files, such as letters and reports from other hospitals. This central system means that data can be retrieved quickly as soon as it is needed, making it as painless as possible for both staff and patients.

With such a high reliance on electronic data and up-to-date information, a highly secure and reliable system was needed that enabled staff to access backup data in case of an emergency. The Data Protection Act, first enforced in 2000 and updated on 24th October, makes it more crucial than ever for healthcare organisations to keep patient data safe and prevent unauthorised access or data leakages. A medical identity theft or non-compliance with the act could cost an organisation millions, in addition to lasting damage to its reputation.

Secure online backup for peace of mind

Having had some bad experience with tape backup from previous positions, LOC IT Manager, Steve Rumbles, brought in Databarracks to deliver the backup of all its data systems in January 2006.

With the advantage of a Greenfield site and no legacy systems, the LOC was able to implement state of the art technology from scratch. Tape backup alone was not deemed an option by Steve, as it relies too heavily on human intervention, and inevitably makes it vulnerable to human error. The clinic contracted Databarracks to move its backup online, and currently has 1.5 Terabytes of data stored across its 11 HP servers backed up with Databarracks. As the data is compressed for transport, this is shrunk to 325 gigabytes stored in Databarracks’ facility, introducing significant cost and time savings..

“I believe that online backup is more secure than tape backup as information is not being moved from one premise to another. With large organisational growth, tape backup really becomes unmanageable,” said Steve Rumbles. “Our biggest advantage with Databarracks is the peace of mind – if anything on the backup side goes wrong, a Databarracks representative will call me and sort out the problem as soon as it occurs.

The system automatically backs up seven days a week between 11pm and 7am and when complete, the IT department receives an email from every backup set. What’s great is that only the files that have been created or changed by staff that day are backed up overnight to the Databarracks system, freeing up system resources. The backup procedure does not require my input and does not affect our doctors’ and nurses’ from working, as all applications can still be accessed during the backup process, and no downtime occurs.

Rumbles concludes, “The Databarracks solution is easy to use and runs very much by itself.

This means we save considerable IT staff time and therefore money and enables our IT Department to focus our efforts on other critical processes that need the human touch.”

For over 20 years, HMI has been the leading buying group of independent optometrists, opticians and dispensing ophthalmologists across America. Founded in 1983 by Dr. Jerry Hayes, HMI has grown to become the world’s largest optical buying group wholly owned by an optometrist.

Databarracks have been looking after HMI’s backup for over three years backing up data across all of their critical business systems. Shirleen Prescott from HMI: “I found Databarracks on the internet and I was initially concerned that they were a U.K. based company but they were able to connect to our systems with their online helpdesk and install and configure the backup service while I watched. We also backup onto tape which we take to a bank every day and have used Databarracks as a secondary backup, but after the recent Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi we realised that all of the banks had closed anyway so retrieving data from our tapes would have been impossible. We were audited after the hurricane and I was especially please with the auditors assessment of our preparedness for a disaster like this, thank in part to Databarracks.

On a day to day basis Databarracks monitor our backups for us, inform us if a daily backup has failed and then dial in and fix it for us, this means that even when I am out of the office, I know that the backups are being looked after. Databarracks have proved to be a very cost effective and efficient way of protecting our business data and their 24 hour helpdesk (manned by very friendly and helpful staff) means I am no longer worried that they are not in the U.S.

Smythson is one of only eight companies to hold four royal warrants and supplied invitations for the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer. It also counts Giorgio Armani and the actors Gwyneth Paltrow, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson among its customers.

The company, set up in 1887 by Frank Smythson, started by producing diaries, which had thin blue paper rather than the conventional thick white pages. Mr Smythson claimed that his early diaries were inspired by the Nile Blue colour that had entranced him on a visit to Egypt.

Databarracks implemented a comprehensive offsite backup strategy for Smythson, which backs up their Bond Street Head office as well as satellite offices in New York and Swindon. Their nightly backup includes SQL, Exchange, Sage and all the usual office files. As well as this there are bare metal backups of key servers including stock control and provisioning application servers.

Mike Burnett of Smythson said “'Our experience of Databarracks has been very positive. The setup process went smoothly and the solution has been running effectively. Any problems have been dealt with swiftly by their support team.”