West Brom Turns to Quest NetVault: Backup

Quest Software, Inc. announced that the West Brom building society has implemented Quest NetVault: Backup to consolidate, streamline and strengthen its data protection strategy.

Ease of use and deployment, support, and the option to encrypt were additional reasons why Quest NetVault was selected.
 
The sixth largest building society in the UK, West Brom has to follow strict policies and regulations when handling, storing and backing up its 10 TB of data as, like in any financial services organisation, all its data is sensitive and important as it can relate to customer information.

However, trying to resolve backup failures on the legacy software was proving challenging; this and other concerns about the solution led the team to investigate some alternatives. The criteria were: the new product should reliably back up all the society’s data to tape while being easy to use and offering great technical support.

In terms of budget, the West Brom was looking for a solution that would not prove considerably more expensive than its existing one, but at the same time would not force the team to compromise on quality or reliability. Considerations about scalability and future proofing were also put forward to ensure the protection of applications such as SQL and VMware. To add to the list, the looming expiry date of the existing maintenance contract meant the new software needed to be in place before this deadline and the new backup product up and running before the switchover.
 
The West Brom reviewed Quest NetVault: Backup, spoke to existing users then went ahead with the installation, which was straightforward taking only a few minutes for both servers and clients; even the configuration of the tape libraries was quick, as no particular expertise was necessary and limited training was required. Once everything was set up the team was running backups straight away.

A Quest NetVault server is now connected to a tape library via a dedicated backup switch and handles all the LAN-based backups; two additional clients are linked to a similar tape library each via dedicated backup switches. Although for security reasons all the tape libraries feature encryption, the Quest NetVault server did not need to be amended as the encryption takes place on the library. In addition the network hosts a Quest NetVault server connected to clients on the other side of the firewall (the DMZ) and this gets backed up to a separate library. This part of the network is encrypted using the software included in Quest NetVault: Backup.
 
West Brom has realised benefits including:

• consolidation from two to one backup solution
• ability to use Quest NetVault: Backup in a full test environment thanks to the 45-day evaluation
• ease of deployment for server or clients
• ability to upgrade to the latest media technology
• ease of use in the production environment including jobs creation and clearer job logs
• cleaner completed backups thanks to the software VSS capability to backup open files
• ability to kick off jobs via a third-party scheduling management software tool via the command line interface
• option to use software encryption
• quality of support thanks to Quest’s Data Protection team.

"With Quest NetVault: Backup when an administrator restores an SQL server we get back data ‘snapshots’ taken at the time of the backup so that once the server is restored it is immediately up and running with data," said Peter Collingridge, Head of IT at the West Brom. "This enhances our productivity and performance. The highly attractive price tag of the software also helped us to justify the expense."
 
Although the West Brom IT team backs up approximately 200 servers daily, Quest NetVault does not require much management unless a backup failure has occurred (these tend to be server-related issues). Also, if a server is decommissioned it  gets removed and its jobs deleted.

Since installing Quest NetVault: Backup, the West Brom has managed to recover all of its applications at its remote site and run jobs and schedules on those servers. It has also not failed a single disaster recovery test, a significant achievement for any organisation.
 
"The IT team at West Brom prides itself on the support its infrastructure provides the society and data protection is a key element of its strategy," added Richard Moseley, VP Sales EMEA/APAC Data Protection, Quest. "Like any financial services organisation the West Brom is subject to a multitude of pieces of legislation governing the way data is handled, stored and protected and Quest NetVault: Backup has ticked all the relevant boxes."
 
Today all the West Brom applications are protected by Quest NetVault.