Resources > Case Studies > AppAssure Software Helps the California Almond Board Support an Entire Industry

AppAssure Software Helps the California Almond Board Support an Entire Industry

California Almond Board

Visit Website »

Challenge: Real-time Exchange backup/recovery, SharePoint environment protection

Solution: AppAssure Live Recovery solution

Results: Snapshots of Exchange and SharePoint data every 10 minutes, immediate data recovery

Background

Last year, 1.5 billion pounds of almonds were grown in California. That’s 81% of the world’s supply. Established in 1950 through a Federal Market Order, the California Almond Board supports every grower in that state with information, market expansion efforts, and more. The Board’s wide-range of responsibilities are managed by a staff of about 40 people. Bill O’Donnell, Senior System Administrator says that e-mail is vital for communications and the Board’s website is essential for getting information to constituents. Keeping both systems up and running with up-to-the-minute information is critical. He relies on AppAssure for Microsoft Exchange backup and recovery and also protects his SharePoint environment to keep his website readily available.

Downtime is Not Acceptable

The California Almond Board has a huge responsibility; it supports an entire industry. Like other industry boards, the California Almond Board was established through a Federal Market Order and is charged with providing information to members and expanding markets to increase their overall market share and revenue. California almond growers already supply 81% of the world’s almonds. Last year, they grew and shipped 1.5 billion pounds of almonds to other states and around the world. Communications between the Board’s small staf (about 40 people) and its many constituents are the core of its operations. “We can’t have downtime on e-mail or the website,” explains Bill O’Donnell, the Board’s Senior System Administrator. Bill was using tape backup for Exchange data but explains “that doesn’t work for real-time restore.” Also, new web initiatives were on the table that required having a fast backup and restoration system that functioned with Microsoft SharePoint. Fortunately, Bill received a call from AppAssure.

Protecting Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint with AppAssure

“I attended a Cisco-related event and met AppAssure,” says Bill. “After the event, I got a call and the sales rep explained that AppAssure would let me do live restorations of my Exchange and SharePoint servers. I really loved that.”

quote

Now, Joe protects three SQL servers, one back-end Exchange server, and a few physical servers that run financial software and geographic information systems. “Implementation was flawless,” remembers Joe. “It could not have been simpler.”
Bill implemented AppAssure on a weekend and estimates that installation, roll-out to three servers, and making sure it was all working took no more than 2 hours. “Implementation was very simple and everything worked right away,” reports Bill. “It was a happy surprise.”

Now AppAssure is taking snapshots of the Board’s Exchange and SharePoint applications and related data every 10 minutes. “AppAssure just runs itself,” says Bill. “I just check the console every now and then to make sure that everything is o.k. and it always is.”

What if he didn’t have AppAssure ?

Since AppAssure has been in place, the California Almond Board hasn’t suffered an outage that would require application or data recovery. Bill knows that he’s covered in case an outage does happen. And he knows he’s much better of than he was with tape libraries. “Without AppAssure, I’d have to retrieve backup tapes that might be off-site and then rebuild servers. When I got back up and running, it might be with data that was a few days old. With AppAssure I’ll get e-mail or the website back immediately and with current data. That’s important because I’m concerned about total uptime.”

“When I came to the Almond Board I began to build an IT toolkit,” says Bill. “It turns out that AppAssure is an essential solution.”

About California Almond Board
California Almond Board

The Almond Board of California administers a grower-enacted U.S. Federally Mandated Marketing Order under the supervision of the United States Department of Agriculture.

Established in 1950, the Almond Board of California’s charge is to promote the best-quality product and increase production of almonds, California’s largest tree crop. The Almond Board of California seeks to expand the domestic and international markets for almonds through generic public relations, advertising, and other marketing activities. It also tracks almond industry statistics and annually publishes the Almond Almanac.


AppAssure Software for Exchange continuously protects and monitors the health of your Exchange data stores and allows administrators to quickly search, recover, and analyze mailbox content. With AppAssure Software for Exchange you can backup and restore individual email messages, folders, or mailboxes to a live Exchange server or directly to a PST, thereby solving some of your most costly and time consuming challenges.
AppAssure Software for SQL is an enterprise SQL server backup and disaster recovery software solution developed to assure comprehensive protection - including system and user databases, SQL binaries and the server - making it possible to restore both servers and databases in just minutes.
AppAssure Software for Hyper-V is an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery software solution designed for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments. AppAssure Software for Hyper-V supports both host and guest level backup methodologies while delivering accelerated backups, fast local recoveries and disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
AppAssure Software for SharePoint is an enterprise backup and disaster recovery software solution developed to assure comprehensive protection - including front-end servers, SQL servers and the web servers - making it possible to restore both the entire SharePoint environment, individual SharePoint servers and databases and individual SharePoint objects in just minutes.
AppAssure Software for Windows Servers is an application-aware, server-based backup and disaster recovery software solution that delivers fast application backups, fast local recoveries and off-site disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
Small businesses typically have limited IT resources and smaller staffs than large enterprises, but with AppAssure Software for Windows Small Business Server they have full access to the same powerful server backup and recovery software tools found in larger organizations.
AppAssure Software for VMware is an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery software solution designed for Windows workloads running VMware virtual environments. With one price for an unlimited number of guests, AppAssure Software delivers accelerated backups, fast local recoveries and disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
AppAssure Software for Windows Desktops (VDI) simplifies and automates backup and disaster recovery processes, while giving an administrator the ability to remotely monitor and manage large VDI deployments or geographically distributed machines from a single console.
DocRetriever for SharePoint dramatically simplifies the process of restoring individual documents, sites, sub-sites and folders. SharePoint Administrators no longer need to spend countless hours rebuilding your entire production database, or worry about deploying a temporary SharePoint recovery farm, just to recover an individual document or list item.
MailRetriever for Exchange is an affordable and easy-to-use e-mail recovery software package for browsing, recovering, searching, exporting, and analyzing e-mail and mailbox content directly from any unmounted Microsoft Exchange Data Store (EDB). MailRetriever for Exchange can even open and repair corrupted EDB files. With MailRetriever for Exchange, you are never more than just a few clicks away from recovering a message or mailbox. MailRetriever for Exchange eliminates the need for time-consuming full-server and EDB restores for message recovery.
For individual message or mailbox recovery, AppAssure Software and Microsoft Storage Solutions have partnered together to deliver MailRetriever for DPM, enabling Microsoft Exchange administrators around the world to gain efficient and economical access to message-level recovery.
AppAssure´s Backup software for Kaseya lets you recover from any server failure to physical or virtual machines in minutes, backup and recover either locally or offsite, and provide offsite DR to customers with low bandwidth through integrated deduplication and replication.
AppAssure Backup & Disaster Recovery Software is best way to back up and protect your VMware virtual machines. It doesn´t just support your virtual environment - rather; it leverages VMware ESX, ESXi and vSphere to provide a whole new level of protection for all your virtualized applications, services and desktops. AppAssure Software lets you meet your VMware backup RTO and RPO objectives for less.