Architectural Firm BCRA Chooses AppAssure

AppAssure Software, Inc. announced
that BCRA, a Tacoma, WA-based design
and architecture firm that serves clients in 20 markets throughout the USA and Asia,
switched from CommVault Simpana to AppAssure’s Replay4 backup and
recovery software.

With Replay, BCRA managed to eliminate growing backup
window as well as implement offsite replication for disaster recovery planning.

"We tried several
backup solutions over the years because we needed to make sure that we had good
backups and good restore capabilities should anything happen to our data,"
says Phil Lewis, BCRA’s IT Director. "Years
ago, we used Symantec Backup Exec, but in 2007, when Symantec bought Veritas,
they pushed out a buggy version upgrade causing us to lose confidence in it, so
we got rid of it and switched to CommVault’s Simpana."

The process of making sure BCRA’s data was backed up involved the IT team working with CommVault’s agent
on their Exchange and SQL servers, states BCRA’s Network Administrator John
Hicken. They did daily incremental backups, and full backups of the data once a
week. But this is where the team kept running into trouble, he notes: "Because of the large amount of data we had,
the weekend backup window kept growing. It was running well into the week, like
Wednesday and Thursday, and this wasn’t good because it slowed down the rest of
the staff’s work."

In contrast, when Lewis and Hicken saw that AppAssure’s
Replay eliminates backup windows and images entire servers (not just the data),
and includes replication, they said: "This
is what we need."

"We started by
putting Replay in our existing space," recalls Lewis. "Then we decided to go the next step and put
Replay in a data center off-site for disaster recovery planning purposes. Jon
tells me I got a lot of green check marks and I sleep like a baby now."

As Hicken states, the excruciating backup window that BCRA
experienced was eliminated with Replay. BCRA is protecting volumes
on four mission critical application servers, each at different snap intervals
depending on risk assessment. Incremental snapshot of the main
file server is at 30 minutes, the Microsoft Exchange server hourly, and the
Microsoft SQL server twice a day. "Replay
is almost hands-off," says Hicken. "In the morning, I take a glance
at it, and it’s always doing its job getting the snaps."

As for replication, notes Hicken, the off-synch that BCRA
had to contend with PeerSynch has been solved. "We have servers and a 100MB pipe to the
co-lo data center. When I look at Replay’s replication information, the backup
window is virtually gone. We’re always at the last snap. There is no synch
issue, nor lag time."

In addition to replication, DR confidence, and continuous
disk imaging, BCRA has also gained additional bonus features with
Replay – features that Lewis and Hicken say they didn’t necessarily expect.
"We’re now showing 53-100% in disk
space savings," says Hicken. "When you can access a full volume
immediately, that’s impressive. Replay saves a lot of space, even though we
keep dailies for up to two months."

The other benefit is a return on
investment, says Lewis. "The cost of
a loss of a day’s work with nightly incrementals at BCRA is astronomical,"
explains Lewis. "Let me just say that previously, the cost was great
compared to the risk we were carrying. AppAssure’s Replay paid for itself in
all these areas."

Comparing where BCRA was previously to where the company is
today, Lewis says: "In the past,
we’ve taken unnecessary risks by letting price dictate our solutions. With
Replay, we’re not taking risks AND we’ve got a good price point. In fact, we’re
now in great shape."