Construction Distributor Brock White Switches to AppAssure

AppAssure
Software, Inc. announced that Brock White LC, a St. Paul, MN based distributor of construction materials, switched from Symantec
Backup Exec to AppAssure’s Replay 4 backup and recovery software to solve the
challenge of lengthy backup windows and slow data restores, having reduced data
recovery time from 12 hours to 15 minutes.

As Mike Somers, Brock White’s IT Director, said, he knew
that if one of the company’s Exchange servers went down, that would be a real
disaster for his company. "None of our important data was replicated
off-site, and that made me really concerned," noted Somers. As the head of
a three-person team that oversees all aspects of Brock White’s technology,
Somers knew that Brock White faced key vulnerabilities in their ability to
effectively distribute to their concrete and masonry construction markets.

"The company had been using Symantec’s Backup Exec for
a long time. We used it for application backup, such as Exchange, while using
vRanger to back up the VMs," said Somers. Exchange backups at Brock White
were taking longer and longer, up to 12 hours", added Somers.

"vRanger left a ‘hanging snapshot’ and corrupted the
Exchange VM one day," recalled Somers."I personally had to be
involved with the restore, trying to monkey around with Backup Exec. I spent an
entire weekend restoring Exchange – it was awful."

As Somers stated, this disaster sent him in search of a
better product that would give him the confidence and capability he needed in
his data. "We looked at the NetApp Snap Manager for Exchange as a
possibility but it was too expensive for us," said Somers. "Then we
heard about Replay and have been completely satisfied ever since."

"Since purchasing Replay," explained Somers,
"Windows updates have clobbered our Exchange servers a couple of times.
But with Replay, we don’t have so much fear. We just roll back to the last good
snap and in 15 minutes we can get the servers back up and running." Somers
noted that what used to make the team sweat – mission-critical application
servers such as SQL and Exchange going down – doesn’t exist anymore. In fact,
Brock White’s team has ha several server outages recently and with Replay, the
restores were quick, efficient, and easy", said Somers.

"We’ve now restored a couple of SQL databases with
Replay and it has worked great," he said. "We run document management
apps, SharePoint, vCenter, Citrix, IT SQL, Data Warehouse, a budgeting solution
application, and a lot of other mission-critical apps on SQL. Our vCenter
database got corrupted, but the restores were quick and easy. We know this
works. We have extra confidence now."

While the Backup Exec failure debacle was the catalyst for
Brock White’s IT team to search for a better solution, said Somers, Replay’s
ability to replicate data to an offsite repository quickly became the company’s
forward-focused disaster recovery strategy.

"Right now we replicate from the primary data center to
one of the larger sites that has a Replay server," says Somers. "In
fact, we have about 24 servers we’re replicating. Luckily we’ve not had to do a
restore from one of the remote sites, but we’ve spun out the VM from the remote
to a co-lo to test it out, and we’re ready to go. Our DR plan is, if the main
center went down, we’d take the Replay server from the co-lo and restore it,
and then be back up and running in no time."

Somers’DR plan with Replay taking the lead is coming in at
half the cost of what Brock White had budgeted for backup alone. "What
started as just our backup need quickly became our main DR plan," claimed
Somers. "I tell other people, I know what it’s like to be in their shoes.
Replay really does work and I just don’t worry about this now."