Plastics manufacturer eliminates “nightmare outages” with new data protection system

A UK-based plastics manufacturer has eliminated “nightmare outages” following the implementation of a new data protection system that has allowed it to cut its backup time and reduce its storage requirement.

PW Hall, a Glasgow-based producer of colour and additive masterbatch has recently installed the ‘Unified Data Protection (UDP) Appliance’ from data protection and recovery software specialist, Arcserve, after its previous tape backup and recovery solution was proving to be unreliable.

Using its existing system, the company’s backup window was reaching 13 hours, limiting PW Hall to one daily backup. If an outage did occur, a member of the team would have to travel six miles off-site to retrieve tape backups before the restore could begin to take place, impacting on manufacturing, sales and productivity.

The company worked with Epaton, a UK-based reseller of Arcserve products, to select a backup and recovery solution that could handle its data volumes and cut down the time it took to backup and recover business-critical data.

The UDP appliance chosen protects 850GB of PW Hall’s data that is core to manufacturing and sales processes - reduced from 3TB through deduplication. This includes flat files, SQL, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and Exchange mailbox data across 12 virtual and five physical servers.

Instead of one time-consuming overnight backup, the new system makes incremental backups throughout the day, reducing the backup window to approximately 90 minutes.

Backups run every six hours for servers where the change in the data is low, and every four hours where the server data delta is high. These backups are then replicated offsite to Arcserve’s cloud-based server.

“Outages were a nightmare – one of us would have to drive six miles to pick up our backed up tape before we could even start to restore missing data. And the backups themselves were time consuming and difficult,” explained Robert Jackson, PW Hall’s IT Manager.

“But it all takes care of itself now, and we have a much more efficient means of restoring data. We don’t need to be actively involved anymore so it frees us up to focus on other tasks such as testing recovery points and other business-focused tasks.”

Arcserve UK and Ireland Territory Director, Richard Massey, added: “A 13-hour backup window is not something any company should have to contend with. Backup and recovery are essential, but they should also be simple. Something IT managers can set up and leave, so they can get on with their jobs.”