Oilfield Equipment Manager Petroquip Energy Services Customer of Zetta.net

Zetta.net (Zetta, Inc.) announced that Petroquip Energy Services LLC has selected its enterprise-grade cloud backup and DR solution to replace its previous backup solution for lower cost and less management time.

Since deploying Zetta.net DataProtect, the oilfield equipment company has seen its costs reduced by 80%, while shortening time spent on backup management and adding new DR functionality.

To manage just under 1TB of business data produced by user-generated spreadsheets, engineering data, and revisions, the company’s IT environment is centered around four physical servers running Windows 2008 R2 at three sites, as well as Hyper-V virtual servers. Data is kept on a NAS, which has about 4.5TB of HDDs. The NAS also serves as a local backup of data from all employees’ Windows desktop and laptop computers.

Petroquip originally outsourced its backup, but the results of the company’s previous outsourcing solution were unsatisfactory.

“Not only were their costs outrageously high – we had been spending over $25,000 a year – but we often had problems with getting restores in a timely fashion, sometimes taking two to three days, during which we were without critical data,” said Chad Alexander, Petroquip’s systems administrator. “About 30% of the company’s data is static; the rest changes often. We may start from existing documents and make changes, resulting in new documents.”

While Petroquip typically hasn’t had problems with recovery, Alexander noted that it’s possible someone could accidentally delete the copy on the network share, which could be difficult to recover.

He added: “Given where our offices are located, hurricanes or other extreme weather could cut our power and Internet connectivity, impede physical access, even destroy our facility. Plus, hardware can fail. So backup is always an important IT requirement.”

Petroquip has realized a number of tangible benefits since moving to Zetta for backup. The company now spends about $5,000 a year for backup and recovery – less than they had been paying. This cost not only includes data coverage, but also overhead for snapshots and periodic global backups.

Zetta has also proven that it can support Petroquip for DR scenarios. During the summer of 2012, the company received a weather alert of a possible hurricane. Using Zetta, Alexander knew that the company had backups of these databases in data centers far from the hurricane path.

“Moving the data to a local server took only about two hours,” says Alexander. “And it reassured us that we could continue business in this office, even if the other office and its database are down.”