Canadian Plant Products Company Taps CA ARCserve

CA Technologies announced that Plant Products Company Ltd., Canada’s largest horticulture plant nutrition and protection company, has selected CA ARCserve backup, replication and high availability solutions to improve backup performance and provide the foundation for a disaster recovery (DR) strategy.

Plant Products, a subsidiary of Trans-Resources, Inc., manufactures products that that are widely used in agricultural, horticultural, turf, and forestry applications. A small staff supports its increasingly complex, highly virtualized IT environment-with VMware virtual machines supporting a majority of the company’s critical applications, including email and ERP.

As the company’s volume of systems and data expanded in recent years, longer backup processes began to consume a disproportionate share of its processing time and capacity. In addition, the company became concerned about the risk of unplanned downtime and began creating a new DR strategy. Seeking to upgrade the performance of its existing backup implementation, Plant Products decided to replace it with the CA ARCserve r15 Family of Products.

"System downtime can potentially cost our company hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue-but we still have to be judicious with how much of our small IT staff and budget we can allocate to downtime prevention," said Gary Forbes, network administrator, Plant Products Company Ltd. "The combination of CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve High Availability gives us functionality we need to mitigate our downtime risk-including the ability to protect physical and virtual platforms, both on and off-premise-while also offering the economy and ease-of-use we need to keep our total cost of ownership under control."

Plant Products selected the CA Technologies solution after evaluating products from CommVault and Symantec. By deploying CA ARCserve Backup, Plant Products reduced the backup window of its second-largest ERP server by 95% – from 2 hours to 6 minutes-thereby helping to ensure that sales teams can always access essential information.

The company also plans to implement CA ARCserve High Availability to help meet the SLAs it expects to establish as part of its DR strategy, which will include the replication of key physical and virtual systems, applications and data to off-premise or secondary locations for maximum protection and availability. The flexible, proactive failover provided by CA ARCserve High Availability will enable Plant Products to keep its business systems running during unplanned or planned downtime-such as when the local hydroelectric power company shuts down one of its facilities for maintenance each year.

Xylotek Solutions, a CA Technologies Gold Partner, delivered the end-to-end solution for Plant Products, from analysis and design to implementation, training and on-going support.

"We recommended the CA ARCserve family of products to Plant Products because of its strong integration with virtualization, its ability to perform disk-based backup with bare-metal restores, its deduplication functionality, and its failover protection," said Chris Pickard, COO at Cambridge, Ontario, Canada-based IT service provider Xylotek. "We have found that CA ARCserve uniquely enables our customers to fulfill even their most demanding data protection requirements, while staying within their budget constraints for both initial acquisition and ongoing operation."