Business Continuity
Backups ease growth pains
Auditing firm uses recovery and
security software to protect stored data.
Orion
Registrar knows a thing or two about
accuracy, efficiency and quality. After all,
the company specializes in audits to ISO
9001 and more than 10 other standards and is
internationally accredited by the U.S.
ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board and
the Dutch Council for Accreditation. In
addition, all Orion Registrar auditors are
qualified to the International Registrar of
Certified Auditors or RABQSA requirements.
The company’s reputation has resulted in
an increase in business and a pressing
demand for the hardware to support it. In
just a year, Orion added six new Dell
PowerEdge 2950s–for a total of eight, so
far–as the company consolidates its server
infrastructure. To help protect this growing
volume of data and new server
infrastructure, Orion upgraded and expanded
its existing Symantec Backup Exec
implementation and added Symantec Backup
Exec System Recovery.
With Backup Exec 12, Orion can back up
126 GB of data, while backup time for full
and incremental backups has decreased by a
third. According to Orion network manager
Nick Joseph, the firm’s volume of data is
expected to swell to a terabyte over the
next year and then double or triple two
years later.
Orion uses Backup Exec for traditional
tape-based backup, as well as disk-based
continuous data protection. Orion can back
up to disk for quick backup and recovery,
and archive to tape for longer-term, offsite
data protection and disaster recovery. Orion
conducts between six and 12 recoveries each
month, so the time savings from using disk
instead of tape quickly add up.
The company is also currently deploying
Backup Exec System Recovery to ensure its
new servers can be recovered in just
minutes, rather than the hours or days it
used to take using traditional manual
approaches. Backup Exec System Recovery
captures the entire Windows system,
including the operating system,
applications, databases, all files, device
drivers, profiles, settings and registry, in
a single recovery point–and without
disrupting user productivity or application
usage. Joseph projects that Orion will see a
99-percent reduction in recovery time as a
result of using the software.
Backup Exec System Recovery also supports
seamless conversion of physical recovery
points to virtual formats, as well as
virtual systems back to physical
environments, and includes wizards for
simplicity and reliability. Consequently,
Orion will now be able to test the various
patches, applications and updates in a
virtual setting before applying them
directly in a production environment.
At Orion, e-mail is a mission-critical
application, but keeping e-mail backed up
yet always available is often easier said
than done. Typically, an organization that
wants to recover its e-mail environment must
back up the Exchange mailbox store database
and then back up individual mailboxes, which
can take up to eight times longer than the
database backup.
Instead, Joseph leverages the granular
recovery features and continuous data
protection capabilities of Backup Exec to
recover individual messages from a
single-pass backup.
“Our recovery success rate is 100
percent, and we’ve had a virtually 100
percent backup success rate,” says Joseph.
He adds that an invaluable bonus is that the
solution keeps him in the loop no matter
where he is. On-the-fly alerts to his cell
phone deliver exception reports and backup
status, so Joseph does not need to be
sitting at a laptop struggling to get a VPN
connection.
Orion understands the importance of speed
and accuracy when responding to auditing
requests. When an international
accreditation organization audits Orion to
determine whether the company is auditing
others correctly, Orion must be sure all
relevant information is available at a
moment’s notice. For that, the company uses
Symantec Enterprise Vault.
With Enterprise Vault, Orion can search
the full text of e-mail messages and their
attachments, and quickly retrieve
appropriate archived content, which drives
down the cost of being audited. In addition,
because Orion is consolidating data at a
central location, the company projects that
its audit travel time and other expenses
will be cut in half.
Enterprise Vault also eases a
considerable amount of the burden of
administering and supporting Exchange PST
files. While IT traditionally had to move
e-mail from Exchange to PST files for
retention, Enterprise Vault migrates PST
files to a central archiving repository.
Joseph estimates that this capability alone
will save between 30 hours and 40 hours a
month on PST support.
In addition, Orion’s many off-site
contractors and other users also benefit
from the ability to access, search and
retrieve archived e-mail messages from their
own mailboxes. This is such a significant
time-saver from both an administrative and
an end-user point of view that Orion is
working on expanding the archive to also
include files and SharePoint documents.
For the past five years, Orion has not
had a significant disruption due to malware,
Joseph says, through its use of Symantec
AntiVirus Corporate Edition. The automated
solution detects and repairs the effects of
malicious code and intrusions while keeping
systems operational. “In the past two weeks,
Symantec AntiVirus successfully blocked 365
viruses,” he says.
Symantec AntiVirus provides a
comprehensive view of clients through
centralized logging, threshold alerting and
graphical reporting, all of which helps
transform security data into actionable
information that meets Joseph’s
administrative needs.
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