4-page Case Study - Posted 11/13/2007
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Engineering Firm Improves Branch-Office Backup Consistency with New Solution
Grontmij is a European engineering consulting firm based in the Netherlands, with 130 branch offices, more than 7,000 employees, and 15,000 projects each year. The firm wanted to strengthen the protection of its branch-office data, which was backed up nightly to tape media by local operators. However, approximately 20 percent of the backups were unsuccessful because of tape-related problems. Grontmij IT staff deployed Microsoft® System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 to provide centralized, disk-and-tape–based backup for the entire company. Today, Grontmij continuously and automatically backs up 100 branch-office server computers over the network, which eliminates branch-office backup chores. The company also saves U.S.$100,000 annually in replication software fees, backup tapes and hardware, and labor costs. The IT staff enjoys higher productivity and increased user satisfaction.
Situation
Grontmij is one of Europe’s leading engineering firms, with more than 7,000 employees and thousands of customers across the continent. The company provides a wide range of engineering, construction, environmental, transportation, energy, and project-management services to companies and municipalities of all sizes. The de Bilt, Netherlands–based firm participates in more than 15,000 projects each year in the Netherlands and abroad.
The company has a decentralized structure, with 130 branch offices that create and manage their own project data. The company has a central data center in Amsterdam that contains approximately 30 server computers, but the vast majority of the company’s servers and data resides in the branches. This was a bit unsettling for the company when it considered its uneven success with branch-office backups.
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We now have one single backup solution for the entire corporation, which provides much better protection for our data. |
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Richard Peters
Senior Technical Engineer, Grontmij |
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The branch offices performed their own data backups, mostly to tape, but there were constant problems with tapes—backups weren’t scheduled, tapes weren’t changed, backups failed, data was lost. “There were too many distributed problems, which caused too much effort on the part of too many people,” says Richard Peters, Senior Technical Engineer in the Grontmij Amsterdam data center. “The operators dealing with backups were either low-level IT staff or office clerks. They weren’t skilled at backups and had no idea what to do when there was a problem.”
As a result, Peters estimates that 20 percent of branch-office backups were unsuccessful. That meant that when users accidentally deleted a file or an e-mail message, the IT staff could restore it only 80 percent of the time.
“Our users had a decreased trust in our backup processes,” Peters says. “When backups failed, we could not always service data-recovery requests. That decreased trust led to users finding their own ways to protect their data—copying files to locations off the network or to another location on the network—which of course brought its own risks. Nonstandard backup procedures incurred additional costs and were not really helpful to the business.”
At one point, Grontmij tried to fill the gaps in its tape-based backup strategy with replication software. The company licensed EMC RepliStor to replicate data from larger branch offices to the central data center and used Robocopy—a command-line folder replication tool that is included with Windows® Resource Kit—to replicate data from smaller branches. However, these applications sometimes failed, loaded the wide area network with too much data, and saddled the IT budget with expensive licensing and support fees.
Grontmij backed up the 30 server computers in its data center to disk-based storage and then to tape. However, the IT staff had to devote two full-time people to replication and tape backup issues.
When Grontmij acquired Carl Bro, another leading European consultancy, the company nearly doubled its number of offices, employees, and server computers. Its backup risks also instantly doubled, and Grontmij knew that it needed a better backup solution fast.
Solution
Grontmij turned to Microsoft for guidance because its file-server, messaging, and database server computers run Microsoft® software. “Using Microsoft software is a key part of our IT strategy,” Peters says. “Microsoft software is lower-cost than other alternatives, and new capabilities come out regularly.”
Peters attended a local Microsoft seminar, where he heard about Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, a disk-and-tape data protection solution that continuously safeguards changed files at the byte level by copying them to a secondary disk and later to tape. “The lights went on for me,” Peters says. “I realized that we could really use this product. We really liked the low cost, the broad functionality, and the program’s ease of use. We are also using other Microsoft System Center software in our data center and liked the idea of using Microsoft software to manage and protect our entire infrastructure.”
Grontmij enrolled in the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 and received beta versions of the software and assistance from Microsoft Services in deploying and configuring it—which took less than an hour. The company first deployed System Center Data Protection Manager in its United Kingdom offices and then in its Netherlands offices. Grontmij has been able to speedily roll out the software to one branch office per day and plans to have all 130 offices safeguarded by System Center Data Protection Manager by the end of 2007.
When Peters completes the companywide deployment of System Center Data Protection Manager, Grontmij will be able to eliminate tape backup systems at all 130 offices and safeguard 160 branch-office and 30 data-center server computers with a single, centralized, disk-based backup solution. The disk-based data is safeguarded with a secondary Data Protection Manager solution for archiving backups to tape. Because the company’s Amsterdam tape library wasn’t large enough to contain backups for the entire company, Grontmij will engage a third-party tape backup service to centrally and professionally manage tapes.
Grontmij runs System Center Data Protection Manager on three HP ProLiant server computers running the Windows Server® 2003 64-bit R2 operating system and uses an EqualLogic iSCSI storage area network for disk storage. The storage used for the secondary DPM servers are independent Infortrend Eonstor iSCSI targets. A dedicated support team of two people manages the backup environment.
When deployment is completed, Grontmij will use System Center Data Protection Manager to safeguard its five Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 database servers, six Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging and collaboration servers (configured in three clusters), and 160 branch-office file and application servers.
Grontmij also uses Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 for collaboration and will safeguard that data with System Center Data Protection Manager when the company upgrades to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. “Data Protection Manager is very well integrated with other Microsoft server software that we use,” Peters says. “That’s a huge benefit and contributes to easier use and better data protection. Previously, recovering Exchange Server e-mail messages required an Exchange Server engineer. Now, an IT technician can restore those files from the Data Protection Manager console.”
Benefits
By deploying Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, Grontmij has greatly improved its corporate data protection strategy and eliminated the frequent branch-office backup failures. With branch data backed up centrally and automatically on disk in the Amsterdam data center, the IT staff is able to service user requests for file recoveries and increase user satisfaction in its services. Also, the IT staff no longer needs two full-time staffers to handle backup chores and problems, which increases the productivity of scarce resources. User productivity, too, has increased, because users can now restore their own files without IT assistance. The company will save U.S.$100,000 annually in labor, tape, and replication software costs.
Increased User Satisfaction
By centralizing branch-office data backups in one location, Grontmij has strengthened its data protection solution and eliminated dependency on 130 different operators. “We now have one single backup solution for the entire corporation, which provides much better protection for our data,” Peters says. “We can keep a close eye on what’s happening from the Amsterdam data center. When backup is distributed, you never know what’s going on without expending extensive time and energy.”
As a result of its centralized, disk-based backup scheme, user confidence in the IT staff has risen. “As the team responsible for backup, we’ve committed ourselves to providing high data availability to users,” Peters says. “Because we’re now providing a higher-quality service to our internal customers, they can provide better service to our external customers.”
Improved Staff Productivity
Grontmij no longer needs to devote two full-time staff members from its small IT staff to backup chores and problem resolution. Instead of changing tapes and trouble-shooting branch-office problems, these individuals can monitor backup activities, develop more intelligent backup strategies, and help with new projects.
In the company’s branch offices, staff members who once had to spend an hour a day on backups now have that time back to do their jobs. Also, using System Center Data Protection Manager, end users can recover their own files directly from Windows Explorer and familiar Microsoft Office programs, which eliminates the need to wait for the IT staff to locate and search through tapes.
Annual Savings of $100,000
Peters estimates that the move to System Center Data Protection Manager will save Grontmij $100,000 annually in IT efficiencies, which are savings from eliminating replication software licensing and support fees and branch-office backup hardware. “We were spending $1,000 per server per year to license the replication programs,” Peters says. “That $12,000 annual savings alone pays for licensing our companywide deployment of Data Protection Manager. More significantly, we’ll save $88,000 annually in tape costs and the daily backup-related work of 130 different operators at the branch offices.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
Microsoft System Center
Microsoft® System Center is a family of leading IT management solutions that helps you proactively plan, deploy, manage, and optimize your IT environment. System Center solutions capture and aggregate knowledge about your infrastructure, policies, processes, and best practices so your IT staff can build manageable systems and automate operations in order to reduce costs, improve application availability, and enhance service delivery.
For more information about the System Center family of solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/systemcenter
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Grontmij products and services, call 30 220 7911 or visit the Web site at:
www.grontmij.com
