Preparation Is Key

An Industry Insight feature with Iron Mountain Digital

How the solution ‘Connected Backup for PC’ addresses backup and recovery issues for a client’s Middle East operations.

John Crane founded in 1917, has built its world reputation by designing and manufacturing seals and associated products mainly for the oil & gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, pulp and paper and mining sectors. The John Crane business has an impressive turnover of US$744 million and boasts 20 manufacturing sites and more than 6000 employees, located in 50 countries. Incidentally, John Crane MENA alone covers 10 countries and employs over 130 personnel.

The growing success of John Crane’s business resulted in considerable increase in the number of office staff administering and monitoring its interests. The daily processing of electronic data had thereby become the lifeline of all core activities. For John Crane’s IT Network Manager, Samad Khokhar, it was the key to address backup risks, to improve data protection, eliminate recovery problems and prudently manage costs – by means of a scalable, easy-to-use backup solution.

Backup risks

Impressed with the launch presentation of ISIT, a fast growing storage company in February, Khokhar approached the ISIT CEO Mahesh Vaidya with the following situation: Despite the crucial importance of the electronic data residing on the employees’ laptops, there was no clearly assigned responsibility in case of data loss. There was no local automatic backup process in place, and it was basically left to the employees to backup their local business data manually on file servers.

The limitation of mailboxes and the introduction of employee .pst files produced a further issue for the manual backups to home shares as this resulted in an inefficient storage of increasing amounts of data. In addition, a growing number of identical local files – for example, corporate PowerPoint presentations – became redundantly stored on John Crane’s PCs and file servers. As if this were not enough, Khokhar realised that the number of mobile workers has been constantly increasing, which perpetuated the risk of losing company information when laptops get stolen or break.

Looking for a solution

In early 2008, John Crane started a selection process, evaluating several backup solutions that could solve its fundamental problems. Within the first pre-qualification phase, several vendors were evaluated in terms of offered product functionality, scalability, usability and price. Eventually, ISIT’s solution of Connected Backup for PC by Iron Mountain Digital remained amongst the top two choices.

At this juncture three main criteria were looked into before John Crane chose Connected Backup as its favourite backup solution with its ability to reduce the .pst file volume by up to 80% by means of the integrated EMAILOPTIMIZER, which uses SendOnce (de-duplication) and Delta Block technologies. Secondly, the product’s ability to check the network speeds before starting its backup process through bandwidth throttling. And finally, it offers the option to manage the backups easily in one central console, while still being able to specify backup parameters individually for each user. Today, it is Iron Mountain Digital’s leading market position and Connected’s ability to restore PCs and laptops to their previous working condition after a HW failure that has turned the tide towards Iron Mountain. “Connected Backup for PC convinced us because of the balanced combination of technical flexibility and business value,” says Khokkar.

Enrolment

John Crane ultimately started the rollout process together with Iron Mountain Digital and its partner ISIT. Impressed with the process and procedure Khokkar states: “We received excellent cooperation, support and service from ISIT with their simple and effective solution from Iron Mountain which ultimately proved very valuable for us. ISIT’s unique approach to storage in partnership with Iron Mountain’s comprehensive solution makes for a winning combination from which customers have greatly benefited.”