Food Distributor Mitigates Million-Dollar Risks by Switching to Dell AppAssure – Gains Continuous Backup Protection and Replication

Environmental Snapshot:

• Exchange mailboxes: about 60
• SQL server: 1 SQL server with 10 databases, including SQL reporting, MS Great Plains for distribution and production, Blackberry services, cube reporting model
• Windows file servers: 3
• Data: 2 TB

Business Challenges

When Chris Pechtold was first approached about taking on the first Director of Technology position at Imler’s Poultry, he sat down with the company partners to get a full understanding of the IT challenges facing the company. At that time, Imler’s Poultry was outsourcing their IT, dependent on a homegrown backup solution that included making sure one TB USB was taken offsite every night. “One of the partners told me the story of a trade show conversation with a colleague in a similar industry who had serious issues safeguarding data integrity,” explains Pechtold. “The other company ended up going out of business and this kept the partners up at night. Imler’s Poultry didn’t want to replicate this disaster.” Because the partners knew they were facing the same risk, Pechtold was brought on board to bring the company’s IT to a strong level. He started by doing a comprehensive evaluation of everything.

“Imler’s Poultry ships over a million pounds of products a day,” says Pechtold, “so one day of data loss is a huge risk. We were looking at easily 2-3 million dollars of lost revenue. As an MS Great Plains environment, we rely heavily on our SQL transactions. This database gets hundreds of updates per hour as the entire sales staff updates orders, so I had to break the news to the partners that they were facing a two-day possible loss of data and revenue with the current backup system. In addition, taking home the backup USB each night just wasn’t good. I told them, I’m not doing that.”

Imler’s Poultry’s outsourced IT company used a resold, homegrown backup and disaster recovery product which had a name that Pechtold did not recognize. “It only ran once a day, and because our data changes every minute, a failure would result in lost revenue and inability to deliver products already ordered, which would then result in lost customers. We faced the possibility of empty warehouses, workers without the ability to ship, and staff downtime. This was a risk we couldn’t sustain.”

Solution

Pechtold immediately went to work researching new backup solutions that would eliminate Imler’s Poultry’s risk as well as meet specific criteria that Pechtold knew the company needed in order to ensure business continuity, including continuous protection, block and item level restore, and superior replication.

“In previous jobs, I’ve worked with Backup Exec, Tivoli, and other major BDR products,” says Pechtold. “I know and have experienced their weaknesses. I didn’t want an expensive solution, and I didn’t want to have to buy a SAN. So the price point was important. Also, we needed continuous protection for the literally hundreds of hourly data changes. I needed to know where this information was. Finally, we have multiple warehouses. We needed to be able to replicate offsite in order to recover in case of a disaster.”

It took Pechtold and the company only one sales cycle, including a free trial of Dell AppAssure’s superior backup and disaster recovery software, to realize they’d found what they needed in Dell AppAssure.

Results

Imler’s Poultry’s ever-changing data is now soundly protected by Dell AppAssure’s state-of-the-art backup and disaster recovery software solution, which enables Pechtold to easily and affordably backup and recover any object – from block level data to individual files. Dell AppAssure gives him both fast local recovery and total bare metal restore from a remote replication site. “For us, the frequency of the image snapshots and the ability to quickly restore to virtual to meet operational demands are two of Dell AppAssure’s greatest features,” says Pechtold. “The hourly snapshots and the quick recovery of deleted files or emails means I sleep better at night. Prior to Dell AppAssure, I simply could not recover without losing a day of work.”

Dell AppAssure is protecting Imler’s Poultry’s million-dollar production value in a comprehensive, integrated way:

• Block-based snapshots: Imler’s Poultry gets fast backups with only 1% overhead on production servers.
• Continuous Data Protection: Imler’s Poultry’s incremental snaps are set for every hour in order to keep up with the multiple data changes including every order, every inventory change, and every delivery item.
• Replication: With Imler’s Poultry’s multiple warehouses, the company now has a server offsite. Backups are done locally and then replicated offsite so disaster recovery is ensured.
• RTO/RPO: Recovery time and recovery point objectives are now well within Imler’s Poultry’s comfort zone. No longer a two-day proposition, item level restores have taken less than five minutes and only 3-4 hours in testing for the restoration of Imler’s Poultry’s largest server, with no interruption to the production environment.

In addition to Dell AppAssure giving Imler’s Poultry the key elements of a backup solution they knew they needed, Dell AppAssure’s price point was a huge advantage for a rural company that doesn’t have the financial resources other larger companies might have.

“With small companies like us in a more rural area, the willingness of Dell AppAssure to help train, provide great support, and come in at a good cost point is great,” says Pechtold. “But in the end, it was all about the unacceptable risk we were carrying. It wasn’t about cost saving – I had a blank check, but it’s fantastic that all this is cost-effective.”

A six-generation family company, Imler’s Poultry is now set to take its business strongly into the future, with its priceless data well-protected.

“Dell AppAssure has been exceptional. From the price point of Dell AppAssure, to the product offering, to the support services, we would not have gotten this level of service with Symantec, Veritas, CA ArcServe, or anyone else.”

About Imler’s Poultry

Founded in 1903, Imler’s Poultry distributes more than 4,000 food products to seven states and Washington, DC.