IT Weapons Adopts AppAssure Replay 4 Software

AppAssure Software announced that IT Weapons (ITW), a Managed Services Provider based in Ontario, Canada, has migrated client’s 5-terabyte data center using AppAssure’s Replay 4 backup and recovery software and its Dynamic Replication feature.

 
"When you’re an MSP, the only way you can survive is to provide consistency, minimizing change for clients," explains Ted Garner, CEO of IT Weapons. "You invest in a solution that’s going to be with you for at least 5-7 years. So for 10 years, we used an industry standard backup solution because we knew it really, really well. Everyone here knew its limitations and we just kept adapting as we grew. We had a very complex fibre-, tape-, and disk-configured million dollar backup solution that we knew was in trouble."
 
With ITW’s yearly growth, each backup they did put extra stress on the system. "Each time we expanded," says Garner, "the system stress would increase and we’d find a way to absorb it with our old backup solution, but the volume of backups occurring each week was choking our infrastructure."

Completing full backups within the allotted weekend window was becoming untenable with the load on the servers and network reducing performance for ITW’s customers.
 
By the end of 2011, ITW projects to be managing over 1,500 servers. With such rapid growth, Garner knew it was time to find a scalable backup and disaster recovery solution. "We tested exhaustively," says Garner. "We had very specific, very rigorous requirements that a new solution had to meet in order to keep up with our growth."
 
In AppAssure’s Replay 4 backup and recovery software solution, ITW found what they were looking for. "First of all," says Garner, "AppAssure spent time learning about our business-not just counting up TBs and sending PDFs of ‘what should work.’ They took our entire practice into consideration and they understood our potential. With Replay, we don’t have a full backup window anymore, we don’t have bottlenecking issues anymore, and we don’t have slower servers on the weekends anymore. We don’t just feel as if we merely got a new utility. We now have a business partner in AppAssure who wants us to succeed and will continue to help us grow, adapting to our unique requirements to help us win new business."
 
With Replay 4 at work, ITW has reduced storage space by approximately 140TB due to AppAssure Replay’s backup deduplication and compression. "It takes minutes to bring up a DR server," says Garner, "seconds to restore a file now. But as it turns out, we found out that we got much more than just a stellar backup product."
 
"Several months after Replay 4 was up and running," says Garner, "we had an agreement to host and manage the data centre of a large Western-based engineering company here in Ontario. In the past we would have to spend 12-36 hours onsite to prepare and migrate a client from their data centre to one of ours. But with Replay 4, we looked at the environment remotely, prepped and set up Replay in both places, replicated the data, and effectively moved the enterprise data centre without ever touching one of their servers," exclaims Garner. "I don’t know if it can get better than this-5 TB of data, 15 servers, and no problems. It was so successful and the client was thrilled."
 
IT Weapons recommends AppAssure’s Replay 4 for Windows App Server, VMware vSphere, and Hyper-v Backup and Disaster Recovery. "Now that we’ve used AppAssure’s Replay 4 on the MSP side of the business," says Garner, "we can recommend it to our consulting clients." As ITW launches itself into 2011 with three new disaster recovery sites and new offices across North America, "Replay 4 will be a key component in our growth," notes Garner. "As we say, ‘If a solution or product is not good enough for us to use, it’s not good enough for us to recommend.’"