African Distributor Elvey Security Technologies Migrates to Redstor

Redstor Ltd says Elvey Security Technologies (Pty) Ltd has implemented its platform as it looks for a data recovery and BC solution to assist it in its move to a virtualised environment which complements its on-site systems.

Elvey Security Technologies is a distributor of electronic security equipment in southern Africa. Its vision is to enhance security safety, control and intelligence within homes and workplaces for the quality-driven market, through the provision of technologies and solutions sourced from around the world.

Elvey builds relationships with local and international security brands to provide products to meet the specific needs of South Africans. Its mission is to assist in the protection of people and property by providing quality innovative products and solutions to the electronic security industry, thereby ensuring a safe and secure future for all.

The customer base of the company consists of businesses that install electronic security equipment into both businesses and homes. Elvey provides them with the consultation, facilitation, on-site assistance, training, and technical support required to ensure effective installation at clients across a range of industries.

The organisation is represented at branch level throughout South Africa and has offices in Namibia. More recently, it has embarked on expansion into the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.

Shaun de Lange, IT support and security technician, says the existing backup and recovery solution of the organisation was unable to keep up with technology trends that require more virtualised services.

“Having been exposed to Redstor at a previous organisation I worked for, I was familiar with the technology and how effectively it integrates into a cloud environment. At Elvey, we needed to evolve and embrace a solution that could provide offsite backup and recovery,” he says.

Subsequently, Elvey started looking at Redstor several months ago and decided on doing implementation of the solution.

Following its decision to implement Redstor, De Lange says the company wanted to utilise all the functionality of the platform as quickly as possible.

“It was important for us to ensure Redstor is completely integrated into our 16 South African branches on all our on-site servers as well as the numerous desktops we had at the various locations. To this end, the Redstor platform empowered us to get the most benefit possible out of the solution,” he says.

This includes the latest Redstor Enterprise Server Edition (ESE) backup agent, a variety of DR-related functionality that includes InstantData and Local Backup Copy, as well as image-level backups and recovery for the Elvey virtual environment running VMware.

In addition, Elvey will be migrating to a Hyper-V environment soon and will potentially use the Redstor image-level migration option as a tool to assist it in this regard.

According to De Lange, the Redstor implementation went very well, despite the challenges in having to remove the incumbent solution.

“From the first day, we were impressed with the seamless integration of Redstor into our business. Even though we originally signed up for 9TB of backup and recovery space for our servers and clients, such has been the success of Redstor that we are looking at expanding the amount of storage given our growth,” he says.

Additionally, the after-sales support provided by Redstor has been good, with De Lange reporting that any queries Elvey might have are quickly resolved.

“What we currently have with Redstor is a complete solution for our backup and recovery requirements. Thanks to Redstor, we check our backups daily and restore files weekly. To date, things have been running as it should. We are already identifying other opportunities to expand Redstor in our organisation.“