4-page Case Study - Posted 12/15/2008
Views: 218
Rate This Evidence:
Consulting Firm and Microsoft Partner Saves $64K in Annual Overhead with Data Protection Manager
Overview
Founded in 1986, Convergent Computing is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner located in Oakland, California. The company provides consulting services to help medium and large organizations architect, implement, and support their local area, wide area, and enterprise networks. Its select staff of 65 IT consultants is an expert team that helps organizations better implement and support their network systems through proven experience and best practices. The scope of Convergent’s services is designed to augment the development and implementation process at all stages of the product lifecycle. The company’s Architecture & Design practice focuses on providing custom designs based upon proven methodologies, leading-edge implementation plans, and best practice recommendations. Migration & Implementation services offer assistance with projects involving Microsoft® Windows® Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft SharePoint® Server, along with other services ranging from security lockdown and server consolidation to single sign-on authentication. Problem Solving & Debugging provides performance tuning and optimization for network and messaging systems, and the company’s Temporary & Project Staffing arm offers supplemental support and expertise for long-term, short-term, or project-specific requirements.
 |
With a solution this solid, we have the luxury of being able to rely almost completely on automated backup. |
 |
|
Rand Morimoto
President
Convergent Computing |
|
|
Situation
A Microsoft customer as well as a partner, Convergent had backup and recovery needs that had outgrown Windows Backup, so it tried using the Symantec Backup Exec solution, only to find that it was inefficient, and could not adapt to meet the company’s growing needs. “It was quickly becoming clear to us that the tape environment had become antiquated in today’s business climate,” says Rand Morimoto, President of Convergent Computing. “Not only was the process cumbersome, it was also inhibiting our ability to access and recover legacy data, as the archived tapes themselves were beginning to show significant deterioration after only 12-18 months.”
The tape-based system was creating problems in other areas as well. The IT staff hours required for conducting and troubleshooting backups, along with the ongoing struggles with data recovery requests, had risen exponentially as the performance of the system had slowed. “Eventually, we just stopped responding to routine recovery requests completely,” says Morimoto. “The inflexibility of the system made that part of the IT department’s job cost-prohibitive.”
Ultimately, Convergent began to regard its existing data backup and recovery solution as a business liability. To meet the company’s day-to-day needs, it was no longer a viable tool; however it was important to have reliable data recovery as an insurance policy in case of a true catastrophic system failure. Something had to change—and fast.
By implementing an enterprise-wide deployment of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007, Convergent Computing was able to eliminate the problems created by the performance of its tape-based solution, streamlining the data backup and recovery process, significantly reducing its IT maintenance costs, and dramatically increasing its levels of employee productivity and satisfaction.
With over 100 Microsoft Windows Vista PCs under management, Convergent needed data protection across more than 20 server roles in a Windows Server Hyper-V environment, including Web and file servers, SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007. As an early adopter of other Microsoft System Center technologies, including Operations Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007, and beta versions of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Service Manager, Convergent Computing was invited to participate in the DPM 2007 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for DPM 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) in 2008.
Morimoto says that because of Convergent’s previous experience with System Center, the company felt that DPM 2007 SP1 would best address its most urgent pain points. “We were looking for a robust single-vendor solution that would let us conduct fast, frequent backups on all of our critical servers. We also needed to enable our entire staff to perform self-service recovery on the fly, without having to depend on IT,” he says. “We felt that DPM 2007 SP1 would not only give us the ability to back up our file, Exchange, and SharePoint servers, but also our new Hyper-V virtual host systems, and our SQL 2008 database farm—while also enabling us to perform granular backups of our SharePoint catalogs and indexes” Morimoto added.
The Microsoft Solution
Data Protection Manager 2007, a member of the Microsoft System Center family of products, protects business-critical data using a robust replication and checkpoint system and continuous data protection (CDP) to enable fast, disk-based, consistent backups. On-demand data recovery is made fast with an easy-to-use IT administrator console, or by empowering employees to recover their own files directly from their desktops using Microsoft Windows Explorer or the Microsoft Office™ System.
Benefits
Initially deploying during the first wave of DPM 2007 SP1 TAP in September, 2008, the company was so pleased with the initial results that it immediately began rolling the solution into production. Convergent’s DPM solution is installed on a physical server with a duplicate DPM setup on a Hyper-V virtual guest session to provide redundancy for the system. Using automated functionality in DPM as its central datacenter backup solution, servers across the enterprise are now protected up to every 15 minutes, and end-users are now able to recover their own data files on demand.
|
Now that our IT staff isn’t chained to the backup and recovery process, IT projects that had been on hold for 2 - 6 months are now being completed in real time |
|
|
Rand Morimoto
President
Convergent Computing |
|
|
Data Backup Administration
Automating the previously time-intensive tape backup process has been transformative for Convergent. According to Morimoto, the IT department is now required to dedicate only minimal time and resources toward the actual backup process. “With a solution this solid,” he says, “We have the luxury of being able to rely almost completely on automated backup.” Being able to configure DPM to incrementally backup and restore as needed is an added benefit.
Because DPM is a Microsoft solution and able to provide data protection at a very granular level for the Microsoft server products, it is a reliable choice for organizations heavily invested in the technology. Convergent maintains approximately 200GB of data on SharePoint, including document libraries, wikis, blogs, discussions, and indexes. This makes DPM’s ability to provide a recovery point that restores both the SharePoint Server, as well as the related database, invaluable to the company.
Dedicated staff time for performing and managing the backup process has become negligible, according to Morimoto. He says that the DPM solution has eliminated the need to swap tapes, index data, and perform replacement backups, saving the company more than 150 hours of IT time annually to accomplish.
Data Recovery
The new ease with which Convergent can restore lost data has made a significant difference in overall responsiveness to business needs. DPM has enabled the company to have comprehensive data readily available and searchable in the event of a request from its HR or Legal departments. The ability to recover and access information also improves business continuity—in the event if a disaster, Convergent now has the ability to quickly recover and get back to business.
Employee Empowerment & Productivity
According to Morimoto, Convergent employees used to have to wait at least 24 hours for IT to restore lost data. “Staff members were left sitting and unable to work while IT scheduled a tech to respond, and determined when they could swap out tapes that were being prepared for the evening backup. It was really a bad situation.”
As the previous backup and recovery system grew slower and more cumbersome, IT responses to these requests became more and more irregular, and eventually ceased entirely. With the successful deployment of DPM however, Convergent has now empowered its end users to recover files on their own, without having to incur downtime while waiting for support and assistance from the IT Department.
Today, Convergent employees report that they are much happier because they aren’t suffering through work stoppages, waiting for assistance that never arrives, or re-creating and rebuilding everything they lost from scratch. Being able to own and manage the data recovery process themselves has dramatically improved productivity for employees, providing the company as a whole with a total gain of 20 hours of work time each week. Says Morimoto, “Now that employees can self-recover lost files instantly instead of having to wait hours or days for IT assistance, staff productivity has realized considerable gains.”
Advancing Business Goals
By drastically reducing time on backup and recovery, DPM has freed the Convergent IT Department to work on new projects that help the company decrease operating costs, improve employee productivity, and enhance the bottom line. According to Morimoto, DPM has made a significant difference in the time it takes to achieve strategic business goals. He states, “Now that our IT staff isn’t chained to the backup and recovery process, IT projects that had been on hold for 2 - 6 months are now being completed in real time.” DPM 2007 SP1 gave Convergent the ability to extend the backup and recovery process beyond base application servers to all of the critical servers and systems in the enterprise.
Overall Operational Gains
Incorporating significant time and cost gains realized across the data backup and recovery process, plus the reduction in both IT and end user staff overhead, Convergent estimates its total annual savings at $64,000 annually. “DPM has provided us with measurable savings in direct costs, and significant improvements in employee satisfaction,” says Morimoto. “Very rarely do we have technology implementations that return direct benefits and ROI, but DPM has already paid for itself many times over!”
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 Convergent Computing products and services, visit the Web site at: www.cco.com
