4-page Case Study - Posted 7/9/2008
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Specialty Frozen Foods Company Decreases Tape-Based Backup by 70% with Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007
Overview
Founded in 1986, Windrush Frozen Foods is a leading manufacturer and supplier of specialty foods for the UK foodservice industry, including frozen, chilled, and ambient products. The company supplies Northern Asian, Mediterranean, and European food products to fit most menus, including dim sum, hamburgers, and pasta dishes. Its customers include caterers, restaurants, and institutional foodservice operators. By 2007, the company’s annual revenue had grown to more than £27 million (U.S.$52.8 million).
As a small but successful player in its industry niche, Windrush relies heavily on its database to remain an agile, responsive competitor in a fast-moving market. Any loss of data would not only be a setback for employee productivity, it could also deliver a crushing blow to the company’s bottom line.
The limitations of Windrush’s existing data backup solution had put the company at serious risk for significant data loss should an error occur. This fact, coupled with the knowledge that the current solution had become cost-, time-, and resource-prohibitive due to the increasing amounts of time and effort it took to maintain, support, and troubleshoot, led Windrush to seek an alternative that would be easier to use, and better support its needs.
Windrush decided to replace its existing backup system with one built upon Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007. In doing so, Windrush was able to significantly improve their IT backup and recovery processes with rapid deployment, more frequent backup cycles, and reduced need for staff support and maintenance.
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We needed a centralized backup solution that offered high value for money, and DPM has enabled us to protect ourselves better than any other offering in its price point. It’s dramatically reduced the amount of time and effort we have to put into data backup, and we couldn’t be happier with the results of the DPM deployment. |
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Robbie Roberts
IT Manager
Windrush Frozen Foods |
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Situation
Headquartered in Witney, Oxfordshire, Windrush Frozen Foods is a company on the move. When its current management took over the firm in 1994, the established specialty food manufacturer’s operations went into overdrive. As it garnered more and more traction in the marketplace, the company’s annual revenue grew at an astonishing rate, from £100,000 in 1994, to £27 million by 2007.
With that kind of dramatic growth, Windrush today also operates a distribution facility in Witney, along with another in Park Royal, the largest industrial area in West London. Recently, the company debuted at number 86 in the Fast Track 100 list, which grades the 100 fastest-growing private companies. It also gained star accreditation on The Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For list, an acknowledgement bestowed on less than 275 organizations.
With 75 employees and a near 24/7 operation, Windrush is a streamlined power player on a volatile playing field. Having perfected what it calls “component catering,” the company’s gourmet industrial kitchens provide an interactive environment in which staff engages with customers on food trends, recipes, and new product development. Because the Windrush sales process is somewhat non-traditional—they don’t have a formalized sales force, nor do they rely on a suite of glossy product collateral—it’s of critical importance that the company’s database be rock solid and accessible at all times.
With 20 physical servers and another 10 virtual machines for which to drive the data, the Windrush IT department had its hands full. Monitoring and supporting 150 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and 50GB of new Microsoft SharePoint data every day, the team needed the peace of mind that comes from knowing that their data was being managed and protected as efficiently and reliably as possible. The backup and recovery solution the company had been using for years, Symantec Backup Exec, had become unable to adapt to the rapid business growth and changes that were taking place.
Data backup could only be done once per day—overnight. In the event that a data loss did occur, the database stood to permanently lose all of the information that had changed since the previous night’s backup. And as the amount of data load with every passing day, so did the length of time required to execute the nightly backup process.
“As our business moved toward becoming a 24-hour operation, the downtime required for our daily backup was becoming an issue,” says Robbie Roberts, IT manager at Windrush Frozen Foods. “As the overnight backups began to take longer and longer, performance and productivity were taking a big hit, and we couldn’t allow that situation to continue to deteriorate.”
Because Backup Exec relied heavily on physical tapes, the solution required daily IT maintenance and troubleshooting in order to run smoothly. With an IT staff totaling just three people, that added up to significant resource loss every week. Having a more reliable and more flexible data backup solution had become of paramount importance, and Robbie Roberts was on point to make it happen.
Solution
Through their participation in a Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Exchange Server 2007, Windrush became aware of DPM 2007. “Every day, we were backing up data from a number of Microsoft products, including SharePoint, Exchange, and Office,” says Roberts. “It really made sense to us to deploy a backup solution that was built specifically for those products.”
Data Protection Manager 2007, a member of the Microsoft System Center family of products, provides tailored, application-aware protection for SQL Server, Exchange Server, and SharePoint Server through a powerful user interface, PowerShell support, and a robust replication and checkpoint system. By combining continuous data protection (CDP) with traditional tape backup to protect business-critical data, DPM 2007 enables fast, consistent backup, and easy recovery.
Because DPM provides multiple wizards aimed at ease of use, Windrush IT was able to deploy the DPM solution enterprise-wide in a matter of just days. DPM now protects eight of their servers, including those for the company’s two remote facilities.
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It’s extremely empowering for a small business to not have to worry about the security of its data, and the elimination of the physical tapes has given us enormous peace of mind when it comes to our backup storage. |
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Robbie Roberts
IT Manager
Windrush Frozen Foods |
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Easy Incremental Backups
Once the solution was up and running, the Windrush IT team quickly discovered the difference DPM could make in their backup routine. Before, they had been limited to one overnight backup, which had become a lengthy process that could not adequately protect them against data loss if an error should occur. Says Roberts, “With DPM, we’re now able to back up all of our systems, including Exchange, file servers, and domain controllers—both to disk and tape—up top every 15 minutes. That in itself is a dramatic change for us.”
With the DPM solution, Windrush was able to decrease the time required to perform backups by 50%, and limit their data loss window of liability by 98%, from 24 hours to just 15 minutes.
Reduced time and Resources for Troubleshooting
Because DPM requires only minimal maintenance, and automatically sends a notification to the IT team if a system issue occurs, Windrush has been able to decrease time spent troubleshooting by a full 86%. The IT department also went from having their entire team on point for maintenance of the backup and recovery solution, to having just one employee responsible for managing the process.
“We went from having to dedicate a portion of every day to resolving backup issues, to spending maybe 30 minutes at most, once a week, for maintenance with DPM,” says Roberts. “Not having to be as consistently hands-on as we were before has freed up a lot of our time for other projects.”
Less Dependence on Backup Tapes
Today, Windrush can easily replicate data offsite without the risks and inconvenience of physically transporting tapes between their corporate headquarters and their other facilities in Witney and West London. In all, the DPM solution has enabled Windrush to reduce its need for tape-based backup by 70%. According to Roberts, “It’s extremely empowering for a small business to not have to worry about the security of its data, and the elimination of the physical tapes has given us enormous peace of mind when it comes to our backup storage.”
Cost-Effective Centralized Backup
Overall, Roberts feels that the DPM solution was a perfect fit for his company. “We needed a centralized backup solution that offered high value for our money, and DPM has enabled us to protect ourselves better than any other offering in its price point,” he states. “It’s dramatically reduced the amount of time and effort we have to put into data backup, and we couldn’t be happier with the results of the DPM deployment.”
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 Windrush International products and services, visit the Web site at: www.windrushfrozen.com
