Five Franchises of McDonald's Replacing Tapes by Tandberg RDX

Tandberg Data announced that five Canadian franchises of the fast food giant McDonald’s have replaced onsite tape backup in favour of Tandberg Data’s RDX QuikStor. Selected as a reliable, durable and portable solution to work in a dynamic environment, the RDX QuikStor provides the restaurants with an easy to use, low cost solution that provides high transfer rates and direct access to files.

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McDonalds is one of the world’s top global brands with 30,000 restaurants in over 100 countries serving 52 million customers per day. The McDonald’s model means that over 70% of restaurants are run as franchises, trusting local business owners to develop and run the financial, business and operational management of each restaurant. One such franchise is Restaumac Outaouais, Inc. which looks after 5 McDonald’s restaurants in Quebec, Canada, and has more than 270 employees. The franchise is responsible for the IT infrastructure. The company has about 10 workstations that run on Windows and a main Intel server at the headquarters. In addition to MS Office applications, the critical data that the company needs to protect includes a database for accounting and payroll management, as well as a program that is specifically designed for the management of McDonald’s restaurants (MacPlus). The company has a reasonable volume of data to manage (100GB) but is subject to strict compliance regulations regarding the tracking of sales over a 7 year retention period.

In order to meet these retention requirements, franchise owner, Mr. Guertin, needed a new backup and archive system that was not only simple and affordable, but above all durable and reliable. With no IT support on hand, franchise employees had to be able to use the system easily and quickly and the old tape-based archive system was becoming obsolete and vunerable.

IT support to the restaurants is provided from partner, Les Systèmes Canacomp Inc., who recommended Tandberg Data’s RDX QuikStor as the most suitable solution for the fast paced environment and employee base. The RDX QuikStor proved to be so easy to use that installation happened in three easy steps within a few hours.

Now ‘complete’ backups of the main server are automatically carried out every night and the backup time has been reduced from 6 hours to 2 hours. The majority of resultant data is related to the software program (MacPlus) which automatically forwards the sales figures recorded on the cash registers every night, and can produce reports immediately or as needed. With just a click of the mouse, even the data from the employee time cards can be extracted and exported to an employee management program or service. For increased security in the event of a fire, Mr. Guertin uses two 120GB cartridges every day, one of which remains in the drive at the office, while the other is kept offsite. To allow for growth Mr. Guertin believes he will have plenty of room for up to two years of storage capacity, but if needed, he can buy a cartridge with a higher capacity, currently up to 500GB, which is compatible and readable by the same drive.