SaaS Provider AppRiver Implements AppAssure

AppAssure Software, developer of backup and disaster recovery software products for mission-critical Windows application servers, announced that AppRiver, a SaaS provider offering e-mail and Web security solutions, successfully implemented AppAssure’s Replay 4 backup and recovery software, while having reduced backup and restore time from days to just minutes.

Approximately 110,000 customers worldwide trust AppRiver for their Exchange hosting and security needs. "People turn to hosted Exchange services to get away from the headache and overhead of backup and other administrative tasks," explains David Liberatore, Director of Network Infrastructure at AppRiver. "It’s our job to always look for and find solutions that allow us to offer great customer support."

As Liberatore claims, his team was looking for fast way to restore single e-mail messages or entire mailboxes, when they got an introductory call from AppAssure. "When a CFO calls and needs to find an important, but lost e-mail message, we need to find it fast," says Liberatore.

The AppRiver team researched and collected information about Replay 4 and liked what they saw. "We went through lots of scenarios during our trial," reports Justin Allen, Server Engineer at AppRiver. "We kept trying to find fault with Replay but just couldn’t do it."

AppRiver was also looking for a technical support, remembers Allen. That’s because AppRiver is on the hook to deliver reliable Exchange services to clients 24/7 and needed to know that AppAssure shared a commitment to customer service and would always be available to answer questions.

"They’ve definitely supplied a great level of support and have consistently been there for us," says Allen. "I especially like how proactive they are, and that they solve problems fast. You can tell that everyone at AppAssure believes in their product."

As Allen says, AppRiver now utilizes over 49 Replay servers to provide backup and restore operations. Snapshots are taken every 30 minutes and one backup is kept for each day. "Replay does a great job of compression," adds Allen.

AppRiver’s expansive Replay implementation took one month to complete. "We talked with AppAssure before our rollout to make sure that we were following best practices on building servers and getting everything right," says Liberatore. "Once we got that down, we made a plan that allowed us to fit roll-out in with other work we were doing. One server configuration only takes 20 minutes, but we had to factor in rebooting the server."

Now AppRiver is reaping dividends from Replay’s speed and reliability, says Allen. "The speed of message restoration was a big selling point. It takes less than two minutes to dig into a datastore and restore a message. Without Replay, finding a misplaced or mistakenly deleted message could potentially take days of digging through tapes."

"The functionality for brick level restore is also great," Allen continues. "In testing, we were able to take a restore point and put it on a brand new machine very quickly. We haven’t had to use that capability to address any real failures or disasters, but it is nice to have that peace of mind."

"When you’re protecting the operations of your most critical business systems, feeling good about your backup and restore solution is important", says Liberatore. "There’s real comfort with a product like Replay," he sums it up.