Leading Automotive Products and Technologies Company Switches from Backup Exec to Dell AppAssure Backup, Replication and Recovery Software; Exchange Backup Goes from Six Hours to Zero with 75% Backup Storage Space Savings

Environmental Snapshot:

• MS Exchange mailboxes: 150
• MS SQL servers: 10, including virtualized
• Windows file servers: 2 primary
• Virtualization: undergoing a complete conversion to virtualization at present
• Total data: 5 TB

When the average person thinks about the automotive industry, she or he doesn’t often think about information technology. For most people, the automotive industry simply means cars. But John Grimes is not like most people. Grimes is the Network/System/Windows Administrator for EFG Companies, a leader in the automotive retail services industry, which develops premier products and solutions for dealers. In that capacity, Grimes is responsible for making sure that EFG’s data is kept well-protected.

(Dell AppAssure Dell AppAssure Backup, Replication & Recovery offers 3 innovative and groundbreaking technologies which uniquely guarantee near-zero recovery time: 100% recoverability reliability and anywhere-to-anywhere cross platform recovery such as MS Exchange backup, Windows Server backup, and MS SQL Server backup)

“We deal in some pretty sensitive data,” says Grimes. “Keeping that information secure and available 100% of the time is enough to cause IT nightmares.” For years, Grimes had to come in every morning to see if the nightly backups were working. “For 45 minutes every morning, I’d be checking emails and seeing whether the backups worked or not,” says Grimes. “Because of this, I was getting further behind with my other work. I kept thinking, this is not how backups are supposed to work.”

EFG was using Symantec’s Backup Exec as their solution, and finding that it just wasn’t working the way the company needed it to. “I hate to throw an established company under the bus,” notes Grimes, “but it was horrific. It was slow and ungainly. The user interface was something out of the 1980s and was nearly akin to learning a whole new operating system just to get something backed up. Case in point, even with Symantec’s latest version of their software, you had to go through no fewer than 12 different setup screens for one backup job.”

Grimes and his team too often found themselves in situations where they needed deleted information quickly, and when they tried to get the data, they couldn’t because the tape was corrupted. Not only that, but they kept having trouble with Exchange backup. “There was always a failure on Exchange jobs with Backup Exec,” laments Grimes.

And then there was the Bare Metal Restore (BMR) catastrophe.

“A very old server died,” says Grimes, “and it took me at least 12-16 hours doing nothing but the BMR. Just me rebuilding it. This took my time from other work – from the help desk work and other staff. That was it. I had had enough.”

Grimes went looking for a solid backup and disaster recovery product which would give him the key components that EFG needed, evaluating Backup Exec, Acronis’s Enterprise Backup Suite, and Dell AppAssure. “We tested several different backup systems to find out which provided us the fastest backups, the easiest recovery, and the best utilization of backup resources. Dell AppAssure’s software nailed all three.”

But Grimes had to make sure that EFG’s management was on board with upgrading to a leading Backup 2.0 solution. To do that, he focused on two core issues – EFG’s current IT liability along with the outstanding ROI Dell AppAssure would provide for EFG in the future. “I’d been telling management for a while that the core business infrastructure needed a serious upgrade,” says Grimes about EFG’s liability. “I said that if the building loses power, it’s truly a crap shoot whether we can get stuff up and running. I really didn’t know when one of our hard drives was going to fail.”

As for the return that EFG could expect, Grimes told management that they could expect a positive savings by summer 2011. “I said we’ll get off tape, move to disk imaging, and have such hugely important business continuity features for our co-location and our array as Dell AppAssure’s replication, deduplication/compression, feature integration, application-aware console, and more.” EFG’s management agreed.

Funny enough, because Grimes was so used to spending every morning checking on his backups, the first morning after he easily installed Dell AppAssure, he was a bit shocked. “Everything was just fine. The backup was good and Dell AppAssure was just humming along. I thought I missed something! But I hadn’t. Dell AppAssure was working like it was supposed to. There was no fighting with it.”

A standard for the EFG Exchange server backup used to take anywhere from four to six hours for Grimes. Now he says it takes maybe an hour. “If it’s been a busy day!” he laughs. “Dell AppAssure has given us speed. Pure unadulterated speed,” says Grimes. Not only that, but being able to break away from having to deal with tapes – order the tapes, put the tapes into the automated library, check the tapes, check the backup jobs – means Grimes spends less time having to deal with backups and more time doing his job. “Dell AppAssure does what it’s supposed to do,” he says. “I just set it and forget it.”

In addition, EFG’s storage space has been reduced due to Dell AppAssure’s state-of-the-art compression and backup deduplication. “I’d say we’re at least saving 75% of our previous disk space,” says Grimes.

And then there was another Bare Metal Restore (BMR) scenario, but this one had a completely different outcome with .

“To help with virtualization backup, we have a third party helping us,” explains Grimes. “We had a server we were upgrading, but that didn’t go well, so we had to BMR it. The third party had Symantec’s Ghost, which told them it’d take eight hours to back up the whole thing. I had an extra agent license for Dell AppAssure, dropped the agent on it, and we had it imaged in just two hours or so – which is how long it took us to build the other box!”

BMR goes from 16 hours to 2 hours with Dell AppAssure.
Grimes can now focus on the future rather than spend time with backup hassles. “Right now, we’re in the middle of a CoLo transfer, getting our servers offsite from the main headquarters and into a secure ‘always up’ facility,” says Grimes. “Then I plan on implementing Dell AppAssure for Replication, and focus on the Windows 7 migration. Dell AppAssure’s support has been really helpful with all this. I mean, absolutely outstanding support. One guy I spoke to was quite possibly one of the best, well trained, literate, knowledgeable, patient technicians I’ve EVER had the pleasure of working with.”

As Grimes tells it, Dell AppAssure is allowing EFG to look forward to the future. “I’ve been doing tech for over 20 years,” he says. “In that time, I can count a handful of software about which I can honestly say the marketing is understated. The way Dell AppAssure performs exceeds the promises made in ad copy. This is one of the easiest products I’ve used. Seriously – it’s that good.”

About EFG

Since 1977, Enterprise Financial Group has been one of the leading performance management companies for automobile dealerships throughout the United States and Canada. EFG leverages business expertise, product and process innovation, and national scale to enhance the profitability of its dealer and agent partners.