Food Distributor Imler’s Poultry Picks AppAssure Replay 4

AppAssure Software, Inc. announced
that Imler’s Poultry, a distributor
of more than 4,000 food products to seven states and Washington, DC, switched
to AppAssure’s Replay
4 backup and recovery solution.

With Replay’s continuous backup
protection and replication capabilities, Imler’s Poultry is
reported to have mitigated million-dollar risks associated with
loss of business-critical data.

"Imler’s Poultry ships over a
million pounds of products a day," says Chris Pechtold, Director of
Technology at Imler’s Poultry, "so
one day of data loss is a huge risk. We were looking at easily 2-3 million
dollars of lost revenue. As an MS Great Plains environment, we rely heavily on
our SQL transactions. This database gets hundreds of updates per hour as the
entire sales staff updates orders, so I had to break the news to the partners
that they were facing a two-day possible loss of data and revenue with the
current backup system. In addition, taking home the backup USB each night just
wasn’t good. I told them, I’m not doing that."

As Pechtold states, he immediately started researching new backup solutions
that would eliminate Imler’s Poultry’s risk as well as meet specific criteria
that Pechtold knew the company needed in order to ensure business continuity,
including continuous protection, block and item level restore, and superior
replication.

"In previous jobs, I’ve worked with
Backup Exec, Tivoli, and other major BDR products," says Pechtold.
"I know and have experienced their
weaknesses. I didn’t want an expensive solution, and I didn’t want to have to
buy a SAN. So the price point was important. Also, we needed continuous
protection for the literally hundreds of hourly data changes. I needed to know
where this information was. Finally, we have multiple warehouses. We needed to
be able to replicate offsite in order to recover in case of a disaster."

According to Imler’s Poultry, their ever-changing data is
now soundly protected by Replay’s backup and
disaster recovery software solution, which enables the company to backup and recover any object – from block-level data to
individual files.

"Replay gives us
both fast local recovery and total bare metal restore from a remote replication
site," says Pechtold. "The
hourly snapshots and the quick recovery of deleted files or emails means I
sleep better at night. Prior to Replay, I simply could not recover without
losing a day of work."

As Pechtold says, AppAssure’s price point was a huge advantage for a rural
company that doesn’t have the financial resources other larger companies might
have. "With small companies like us
in a more rural area, the willingness of AppAssure to help train, provide great
support, and come in at a good cost point is great," says Pechtold.
"But in the end, it was all about
the unacceptable risk we were carrying. It wasn’t about cost saving – I had a
blank check, but it’s fantastic that all this is cost-effective."

"AppAssure has been exceptional.
From the price point of Replay, to the product offering, to the support
services, we would not have gotten this level of service with Symantec, Veritas, CA ArcServe, or
anyone else."

Pechtold believes that Imler’s Poultry is now set to take its business
strongly into the future, with its data well-protected.
"AppAssure has been exceptional. From the price point of Replay, to the
product offering, to the support services, we would not have gotten this level
of service with Symantec, Veritas, CA ArcServe, or anyone else," sums up
Pechtold.