Dell AppAssure’s Continuous Protection Allows Architecture Firm to Restore Critical Data in Less Than 10 Minutes after Switching from Backup Exec

Environmental Snapshot:

• Exchange mailboxes: 35+
• Windows file servers: 2 in each office – 2 total
• Data total: about 1TB

Business Challenge

For over 25 years, Pryor & Morrow Architects has provided quality architectural and engineering services to the business communities of Tupelo and Columbus, Mississippi. As a small firm which has won awards for its design excellence and in-house engineering, Pryor & Morrow’s expertise ranges from historic preservation and health care, to golf courses, educational, and correctional facilities.

Although relatively small with 30 staff members in the two locations, Pryor & Morrow’s data protection needs are as crucial as with any large company. “On our servers are mission critical job folders, marketing information, archived correspondence, and layered presentation boards,” notes Kevin Burchfield, landscape architect at Pryor & Morrow and sole IT staff. “Our work and data change literally from hour to hour, sometimes minute to minute.”

These data change needs left Pryor & Morrow extremely vulnerable because, as Burchfield experienced, its backup and disaster recovery software wasn’t doing the work he needed it to do. “We were using Backup Exec with a tape or Dell’s RD 1000,” Burchfield says. “This meant we could only do an end-of-day backup, so whatever data and emails were saved at 5pm was what was saved, nothing more.” Given the huge amount of work that Pryor & Morrow generated from minute to minute, this left Burchfield feeling very uncomfortable. “Every day, six days a week we’d do an incremental backup at the end of the day with new and changed information,” he explains. “Then on the seventh day, I’d do a full backup of everything. And each day I’d take the tapes home. What this meant, of course, was that if someone were working on a presentation board in Photoshop or something with lots of layers, and then accidentally saved over it, or if it had crashed, the entire data set would be impossible to get back.”

This experience was repeated on average about once a month at Pryor & Morrow, which meant that staff would have to redo important work on a regular basis that they couldn’t, then bill for. We lost staff time and company time because the backup software wasn’t able to keep pace with the firm’s needs. On top of that, if a file was needed from several days ago, the time it took to recover that file – i.e., find out the day the file was needed, get the correct tape and mount it, see if the document was there – ended up taking Burchfield well over an hour. “We even had times when someone would delete a whole job folder,” he says, “so I had to go through several daily backups looking for it. It took me a full day, which then affected the architectural landscape work I was trying to focus on.”

Solution

After nine years of struggling through this insufficient process, Burchfield had had enough. He began to research the key items that he needed for backup and disaster recovery, including continuous protection, fast item level recovery, email backup protection, and ease of use. “Initially we thought about updating our Backup Exec,” says Burchfield. “But I’ve not at all been impressed by Symantec products. Backup Exec is just huge and a robber, taking a lot of resources on the server. It’s also expensive.”

Pryor & Morrow needed something cost-effective, robust, and at the same time right-sized to its environment. It needed continuous file protection, email protection, the ability to eliminate the daily and full backups Burchfield had to take home each week, and definable snapshot intervals for quick and easy restores and data mining. Burchfield found this in Dell AppAssure.

“I did the research and I told the partners this is what I like and what we need,” explains Burchfield. “They asked what it would do for us, and I said it would give us continuous file and email backup, easy restores, and the possibility for virtualization. I told them that Dell AppAssure doesn’t hog the resources that Backup Exec does on the server, and doesn’t give you lots of stuff you don’t need. I also told them the price, and they said, ‘Let’s go with it!’”

Results

Dell AppAssure has given Burchfield the ability to set the number of snapshots and the time interval according to Pryor & Morrow’s data needs. “We’ve set them at 15-minute intervals,” he says. “This way we can easily recover the changed data we need, or those emails that were accidentally deleted, if necessary. Just yesterday someone saved over a critical presentation board. Two minutes later I was able to retrieve it. This couldn’t have happened before Dell AppAssure.”

Burchfield appreciates Dell AppAssure’s versatility which allows him to protect Pryor & Morrow’s IT infrastructure in a number of ways:

Granular application-level restores. Burchfield easily explores a backup point, copies the necessary file, and places it anywhere he chooses without having to wait for a tape to “spin” to the right location for that file, all in less than five minutes.

Storage Space Savings. With Dell AppAssure’s superior compression and email restore events Burchfield had to deal with each year after switching to Dell AppAssure. Even more impressive is the fact that he no longer has to spend an hour finding the lost material – Burchfield restores items in 10 minutes or less. This lets him focus on his landscape architecture work, which in turn allows the firm to have enhanced billable hours.

Day-to-Day Work Experience. Burchfield has experienced Dell AppAssure’s centralized monitoring management console, which tells him all is well with his systems. “When you come in in the morning, and know that it’s all working well, you don’t come in dreading the day. The console is easy to read and I know where to go.”

Pryor & Morrow finds itself in a position even many larger companies would envy. It has a robust, state-of-the art backup and disaster recovery solution that allows its staff to focus on the larger tasks ahead of them. The firm is now looking to upgrade to Exchange 2010 shortly and the partners are discussing virtualization for the company’s future.

“I can really rely on this software,” says Burchfield, summing up. “Backup Exec was just so complicated, but with Dell AppAssure, everything is clear and easy. I don’t worry as much anymore.”

About Pryor & Morrow

Founded in 1985, with two offices in Columbus and Tupelo, Mississippi, Pryor & Morrow Architects offers more than 300 years of combined experience in the fields of architectural design, engineering, interior design, and construction.