Stellar Industrial Supply Assures Backups With Unitrends

Unitrends announced that Stellar Industrial Supply, a large Northwest industrial supply company, eliminated their tape backup system challenges with a disk-to-disk data protection appliance from Unitrends. With Unitrends, Stellar Industrial Supply has minimized downtime and business interruption in the event of server failure while automating data protection processes through the easy-to-use Rapid Recovery Console.

Established in 1988, Stellar Industrial Supply has grown become the Northwest’s premier industrial, safety and marine supply, by purchasing additional companies to expand their service areas, adding warehouse locations and by increasing and diversifying their product lines. From eight strategic locations, Stellar serves small, medium and large manufacturers; Federal, State and local municipalities; and commercial construction companies in Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Oregon. Today, Stellar Industrial Supply manages 35,000 stocking items from more than 1,000 manufacturers across its six locations, and relies on computer systems and automation to support every critical business process.

To support this dynamic organization, data management is critical. From price optimization, to cost control, logistics, inventory management and ecommerce, rapid data recovery is needed to include not only the data files, but also the server configurations, core applications, Microsoft SQL databases, and Microsoft Exchange email.

So, in 2006, when Stellar Industrial Supply found that their tape backup solution was not keeping up with their needs, Keith Faller, senior IT administrator, decided to seek new options. Their tape backup would not fully recover a failed server to a dissimilar hardware platform. And, because it is often impossible to exactly match the hardware when replacing a failed server, the lack of dissimilar recovery presented unacceptable risk of downtime. Additionally, tape backup was slow and unreliable.

“Our previous tape backup solution was not keeping up with our needs and we did not feel comfortable with the reliability of the previous backup software,” said Faller. “We needed a quicker and more reliable backup solution that also had the ability to do bare metal restores to dissimilar hardware. Unitrends gives us the reliability and features we were looking for.”

When seeking a new solution, Faller wanted a product that was quicker and more reliable and could provide bare metal restores to dissimilar hardware. In early 2007, Stellar Industrial Supply selected a Unitrends DPU 2000 to protect up to 250 GB of system content. By mid-2009 Stellar Industrial Supply had outgrown the original unit, and decided to evaluate different alternatives to Unitrends. But after evaluating their options they decided that Unitrends offered a far more proven solution. That is why Stellar Industrial Supply decided to expand their software license and take advantage of Unitrends free hardware upgrade promotion.

Now Stellar Industrial is able to continue their valued Unitrends bare metal, file-level, Exchange, and SQL backups as well as their daily archiving to rotational drives for the purpose of disaster recovery without interruption. Their new Unitrends hardware has increased performance and enabled smooth operation of new features in the Rapid Recovery Console (RRC), which Faller finds extremely helpful, not only for monitoring and managing the backups but also for updating the DPU itself.

“I like the new Rapid Recovery Console web interface,” said Faller. “This allows me to quickly check the status of currently running tasks, run reports, set up backup schedules, etc. You can even update the DPUs software from here.”

In the future, Stellar Industrial Supply may be implementing site-to-site electronic vaulting. According to Faller, they are looking at vaulting their Unitrends backups using an offsite vaulting service, to further protect against disaster, and keep them competitive in the new decade.

“Stellar Industrial Supply, like many other mid-sized companies today, struggled with the slow speed, complexity and resource drain of managing a tape backup solution,” said Dr. Mark Campbell, Chief Operating Officer, Unitrends. “At Unitrends, we strive to make data protection as simple and automated as possible, with disk-to-disk speed and efficiency all through a simple management console that can be accessed from anywhere at any time.”

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