AJM Framers Opts for Unitrends to Replace Tapes

Unitrends announced that Texas-based construction firm, AJM Framers, has optimized its backup and data protection processes with a disk-to-disk data protection appliance from Unitrends. Using the Unitrends device, the company benefits from automated backups and a remote administration console so that it can manage data protection for its headquarters in Houston remotely from its operations in Denver.



Headquartered in Houston, Texas, AJM Framers is focused on the framing of nonresidential commercial buildings in the Greater Houston area. Small construction firms such as AJM Framers must make smart IT investments in order to maintain profitability while staying on top of construction industry trends, especially in the recent economic downturn.

Prior to selecting Unitrends, AJM Framers used the ArcServe tape backup product to store its data. Yet, with tape, the company could not deliver rapid recovery of its whole server environment and administration of tape backup processes was difficult. Now with Unitrends, the backup process is fully automated and requires very little administration compared to the old tape system.

According to Brad Schulte, IT director for AJM Framers, it was "a company decision" to move away from tape. "They were tired of pulling tapes in and out, and the amount of data was growing."

AJM Framers uses Unitrends to protect a Windows Server 2003 running their core accounting application, which is Sage Timberline. Even though the environment is small, any loss of data or lack of access to the Sage accounting application would seriously impact AJM Framers' ability to manage their day-to-day business operations. The old tape system did not provide a way to fully and quickly recover the system in case of a server failure.

While Unitrends is often considered an advanced backup solution, due to its enterprise-quality feature set, Schulte believes the best thing about Unitrends is its ease of use. Schulte describes his Unitrends backup solution as being trouble free. "I don't have to do anything with it. I just go in and make sure it's backing up."

Schulte is also impressed with the product's ability to provide remote administration and management. "We're kind of a small operation, so it's hard to justify hiring someone to run my IT department fulltime," said Schulte. "I'm up in Denver and the Unitrends backup appliance is located in our home office in Houston. For me it's fairly easy to get in there remotely and run it."

"It is very important for small and mid-sized organizations to optimize their internal staff resources while also assuring data protection," said Lisa Campbell, chief architect, Unitrends. "This can be very difficult when organizations have multiple business operations. Knowing this, we developed our Rapid Recovery Console with the distributed business in mind so that they could have simplified data protection and recovery operations, regardless of where the data is. It is just one more way Unitrends is lowering the overall total cost of storage."


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