Oncore IT Signed One-Year Contract With RP Martin

Oncore IT Ltd, a cloud and IT MSP,
has signed a one year contract with RP Martin Holdings Ltd,
an international wholesale money-broker, to provide a public cloud-based backup and archival solution to ensure
regulatory compliance, reduce infrastructure expenditure and minimise
day-to-day IT management overhead.

As part of the outsourced service, Oncore IT is providing two storage
solutions: 2.5TB of ‘live’ online backup based on Asigra software and 2.5TB
of archive storage.

In other words, RP Martin is using a Backup Lifecycle
Management (BLM) approach to tier its offsite data storage based on age and
therefore importance and value to the business, saving £22,500 or just over 27%
on its overall storage bill as a result.

Probably the oldest money brokerage in the world, RP Martin employs 355 staff
in 10 countries. With a turnover of £84.4 million, RP Martin acts as a
middleman in OTC financial markets in Europe, Asia, Africa
and America bringing together buyers and sellers of bonds, currency and
financial derivatives, and transacting business on behalf of them. Its clients
are blue chip organisations mainly banks and financial institutions.

To meet USA and UK regulatory compliance legislation, RP Martin is
required to keep all information related to financial transactions in perpetuity.
Primarily this is data from its in-house developed ticketing system – called
BOSS – which records all financial deals made, but email has to be stored as
well.

Scott Martin, RP Martin’s IT manager, says: "Over time our storage needs have grown hugely given the requirement to
keep information should there be a future query. Keeping records of
transactions and being able to recover information quickly back to a certain
point of time is why we are working with a specialist managed service provider like
Oncore IT."

RP Martin has outsourced backup for three reasons:

• First, infrastructure
  costs are saved given it avoids having to buy hardware, backup media and paying
  to ensure the availability of these systems offsite.
• Second, it removes the need
  for non-technical staff to actually carry out and manage the backup process
  themselves which is important as some of its remote offices have no local IT
  staff present.
• Third, it has a team of external experts monitoring 24/7 the
  status of all backups completed – irrespective of public holidays – and
  highlighting if there are any data transfer issues.

Oncore IT first started working for RP Martin in 2008. Scott Martin explains:
"We moved away from a previous
supplier as Oncore IT was substantially cheaper and offered a much more
resilient service given they have a London data centre and a replicated
facility on mainland Europe."

To start the service, a number of USB connected disk drives were provided by
Oncore IT and RP Martin’s IT staff ran an initial data load from its systems
based in London and five international offices. These disks were then taken
away and loaded into Oncore IT’s multi tenanted Asigra-based public cloud
storage platform and a specific RP Martin ‘vault’ created.

To then establish the data updates, one Asigra monitoring client – called a DS
Agent – was installed in RP Martin’s environment to collect data from its
servers. This simplifies rollout and contrasts with the previous solution – provided
by the other supplier – which required monitoring agents on each and every
system.

Once the Asigra DS Agent was installed, data has streamed to the RP Martin
vault which includes not only files and data, but applications and even OSs so
that a complete backup solution is delivered.

Database data and log files are backed up every hour, each day, mid-month, at
the end of each month and at year-end so the amount of data – and therefore the
cost – has grown quickly. Utilising BLM means that RP Martin has been able to
save money on premium online storage by putting it into a cheaper archive
solution but still based on the Asigra solution. In total, RP Martin is
spending £20,625 per quarter on storage and monitoring.

Data is stored both in Oncore IT’s resilient London data centre but then
de-duplicated, encrypted, compressed and transmitted to its Amsterdam site for
security.

Scott Martin concludes: "While we
still need to monitor our data and check retention rules and not totally walk
away from the whole backup process, outsourcing to Oncore IT has taken the
whole problem of day-to-day management out of our hands. While we fortunately
haven’t had to use their service that often, we know Oncore IT is monitoring
our systems closely. They know our sites and services well, such they have
become a trusted partner who I would wholeheartedly recommend."

Paul Cook, Oncore IT’s head of sales and marketing, says: "Our Cloud-based pay-to-store managed service
means you can save data over the Internet to offsite disc storage with complete
confidence about the security and speed of information recovery, guaranteed by
service level agreements second to none. We recognise that business data
devalues as it ages so we adopt BLM principals along with multi-tiered storage
to enable data to be restored within a time period appropriate to its value,
and budgets available. That’s exactly what RP Martin has done."