4-page Partner Case Study - Posted 12/15/2008
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European IT Consulting Firm Increases Data Backup Success by 73% with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager
Overview
INOVATIV is a Microsoft® Certified Gold Partner based in the Netherlands. Founded in 2007, the company specializes in providing advanced infrastructure solutions and training for its customers. Its enterprise clientele depends heavily on the expertise of INOVATIV’s eight Microsoft System Center specialist consultants, one of whom is certified as a System Center MVP.
The IT services provided by INOVATIV leverage leading-edge Microsoft technologies and established infrastructure optimization best practices to develop customized solutions for optimization and management, system architecture, and migration. The company also offers product training, workshops, and project management services, in addition to developing and deploying custom solutions based upon the Microsoft System Center family of products.
INOVATIV’s backup and recovery solution, Symantec Backup Exec, was not providing the level of continuous successful backup the company needed in order to avoid data loss. Data recovery was not consistently performed because it required an entire day of IT time to accomplish. By deploying a solution based upon Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007, INOVATIV was able to ensure a less complex data recovery process, automate backup, perform more frequent and consistently successful backups, and enable its IT organization to focus more time on projects that directly contribute to the company’s bottom line.
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Being able to automate our processes and back up data incrementally instead of once a day has substantially reduced our previous risk of catastrophic data loss. |
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Maarten Goet
Owner and Managing Consultant
INOVATIV |
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Situation
INOVATIV has approximately 17 laptop and desktop computers, most running the Microsoft Windows Vista® operating system. The company needed a system that could provide comprehensive protection for 25 servers in a Microsoft Windows Server® Hyper-V™ environment running on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 R2, along with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server® 2008. INOVATIV also wanted to protect and support the other Microsoft products on its network, including Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006, SQL Server 2005, Microsoft PerformancePoint® Server 2007, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, and other System Center solutions such as Operations Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007.
The company’s Backup Exec solution was challenging to maintain, even for a single overnight backup. According to INOVATIV’s Owner and Managing Consultant, Maarten Goet, “Performing all of the upfront scripting required for Backup Exec required a significant time commitment from our IT Department. We were so busy with other projects that we only had time to run one backup per day, overnight.”
And even the one backup each day they were managing to run was inconsistent, failing about 75% of the time. Says Goet, “Every morning we would come in and have to review the previous night’s reports in detail to determine whether or not the backup had been successful.” More often than not, Goet and his IT team found that the overnight backup had failed, leaving the company at risk for permanent data loss if a problem occurred prior to their next successful backup cycle.
In cases when data recovery was required, it would take at least 24 hours to retrieve the lost data, due to the complexity of the Backup Exec process. If data loss occurred during a time when a backup had failed, the chances of that data being lost forever were extremely high.
To reverse this cycle of failed backups and lost data, INOVATIV knew it needed to find a better way to protect its invaluable business information. The company needed an easy-to-deploy solution that would enable it to automatically backup incrementally throughout the day, without dedicating IT resources toward the upfront development of scripts.
INOVATIV knew it needed a single-source solution that would provide comprehensive support and protection for all of the Microsoft products and technologies it was using—especially Hyper-V and SQL Server 2008. It was also critical that the new solution streamline the data recovery process for both IT and end users, so that data could be recovered quickly whenever needed.
The Microsoft Solution
Because of its Gold Partner status, MVP expertise, and its specialty in developing System Center-based solutions for its clients, INOVATIV eagerly joined the DPM 2007 Technology Adoption Program (TAP). The company already had deployed System Center Configuration Manager 2007, Operations Manager 2007, Virtual Machine Manager 2007, and Mobile Device Manager 2008, and had worked with the Service Manager beta as part of another TAP program. “One of our ongoing corporate goals is to continue supporting the vision of the System Center portfolio,” says Goet. “As we were actively looking to make a change to our data backup processes, it just made sense to get involved with the DPM TAP.”
Microsoft System Center DPM 2007 enables fast, consistent backups and on-demand, employee-driven data recovery. Designed specifically to help IT professionals manage the Microsoft Windows® environment, DPM 2007 delivers continuous data protection for Microsoft application and file servers, using seamlessly integrated disk and tape media. Says Goet, “The technology was so advanced that we felt DPM could really help us reduce or eliminate the complexities we were experiencing with our previous data protection system.”
INOVATIV used its own in-house resources to deploy DPM 2007 enterprise-wide in the fall of 2007. The deployment of the solution itself was fast and easy, taking only a few hours to roll out. DPM’s transaction log replication and block-level synchronization work with the SQL Server VSS Writer to establish a baseline copy of SQL data that is synchronized with INOVATIV’s transaction logs every 15 minutes. During synchronization, VSS Writer identifies the specific blocks of data which have changed, and sends the blocks to DPM, which maintains them as shadow copies of the full INOVATIV SQL Server database. DPM protects INOVATIV servers within the Hyper-V environment using a single host with only one agent on the host platform, or agents within each virtual instance, using shadow copy-based block-level protection of the virtual disks.
Benefits
Improved Data Backup
Making the switch to DPM 2007 has enabled INOVATIV to back up all of its datacenter servers every 15 minutes, instead of once per day. Says Goet, “Being able to automate our processes and back up data incrementally instead of once a day has substantially reduced our previous risk of catastrophic data loss.”
The success of the actual backup process has improved dramatically with the deployment of DPM 2007. INOVATIV has gone from having only a 25% success rate for its once-daily data backups, to having an incredible 98% success rate with 96 automated backups per day using DPM. Using the DPM solution has also enabled the company to utilize a disk-based format to facilitate fast backup and recovery, and have the ability to offload data to tape at night.
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Our data recovery processes had nearly been abandoned due to their complexity, but with DPM, it now takes just minutes to restore lost files. |
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Maarten Goet
Owner and Managing Consultant
INOVATIV |
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Faster Data Recovery
It used to take INOVATIV’s IT team a minimum of one full day to address requests for data recovery using Backup Exec. According to Goet, “Our data recovery processes had nearly been abandoned due to their complexity, but with DPM, it now takes just minutes to restore lost files.” Another feature of DPM that the company especially appreciates is the ability to perform data restoration at a more granular level. Instead of restoring the entire datacenter whenever it receives a request, INOVATIV’s IT team can now pinpoint just the specific data needed, retrieve it, and deliver it to the requestor quickly.
INOVATIV also implemented the self-service recovery option in DPM, which allows users to restore their own files using Microsoft Windows Explorer. The company has found that this feature delivers an overall better user experience, and imparts tremendous levels of efficiency to end users.
IT and Business Advancement
By leveraging the integration between DPM and Operations Manager, INOVATIV’s IT department is able to better manage the company’s backup and recovery processes. Using Operations Manager for day-to-day monitoring of its datacenter servers enables IT to have easy and direct insight into the status of DPM’s data protection from one centralized source. Utilizing INOVATIV Systems Intelligence, a proprietary enterprise solution based on SQL Analysis Services and PerformancePoint Server, the company is able to use these DPM reports to identify key usage trends and adjust its backup strategy accordingly.
Since the DPM deployment, INOVATIV’s IT staff now has to focus only 1-2 hours per week on the management and maintenance of the data protection system. This has enabled the company to dedicate more IT resources toward strategic planning, development of new infrastructure, and providing more advanced solutions for its growing roster of clients. Says Goet, “Because we no longer have to dedicate so many IT resources toward troubleshooting failed backups, we are now able to focus a significant amount of IT hours on implementing plans that advance our infrastructure so that we can better serve our customer base.”
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. For ore information about System Center solutions, go to: www.microsoft.com/systemcenter
