PC-WARE realises a consistent backup system for 70 international locations with CA ARCserve

Transcription

1 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY PC-WARE realises a consistent backup system for 70 international locations with CA ARCserve CUSTOMER PROFILE Company: PC-Ware Information Technologies AG Industry: ICT services Employees: 1,700 Revenue: 833 million (fiscal year 2009/2010) BUSINESS PC-WARE is one of the leading independent ICT service providers in Europe with 70 locations worldwide. Its portfolio includes software and datacentre solutions. CHALLENGE Following the implementation of Microsoft Exchange, PC-WARE needed to establish a consistent backup system across the company. The goal was to centralise backups and reduce costs. SOLUTION A centralised secure environment was realised using a CA Technologies agent-based solution, CA ARCserve r15. Data from virtual and physical servers at 70 locations can be backed up via a single solution. BENEFIT With CA ARCserve r15, PC-WARE can deduplicate data, which has reduced the storage capacity needed for backups by 80 percent. Implementation costs are much lower compared to other products. we can

2 Business One-stop professional ICT solutions Extensive experience of information and communication technologies (ICT), a broad portfolio of products and services as well as a customer-oriented approach are the pillars of the business success that PC-Ware Information Technologies AG has achieved during the last two decades. Founded in Leipzig, Germany, in 1990, the company is now one of the leading independent ICT service providers in Europe. The company had a total revenue of 833 million in the fiscal year 2009/2010. Approximately 1,700 employees in 26 European countries as well as Asia and Africa work for the company. PC-WARE supplies services to customers in all industry sectors and works with global businesses as well as governmental organisations. A core business field for PC-WARE is licensing and contract consulting across the full spectrum of enterprise software. In addition, the company offers a broad range of consulting, solutions and services in the software environment including analysis, design and implementation. Training services and a multi-vendor 365x24x7 helpdesk are also important parts of the company s service portfolio. A profound knowledge of current IT topics is one of the cornerstones of success for PC-WARE in the market. Therefore virtualisation, IT security, system management and communication as well as collaboration and software asset management all feature in its portfolio. We needed to centralise and consolidate the backup processes for our international locations. Oliver Deibler ICT Director, PC-WARE EMEA The second core business of the PC-WARE group is delivered via the COMPAREX brand and subsidiaries. A leading independent supplier of infrastructure, consulting and managed services for datacentres, COMPAREX puts its main emphasis on analysis, consulting, design and implementation, and offers multi-vendor support for complex IT environments. For further information go to 02

3 Challenge Optimisation of backup processes and cost reduction Oliver Deibler, ICT director at PC-WARE EMEA, comments, To deliver well coordinated services and high-level performance to our external customers we require a robust internal IT strategy. For the IT specialists at PC-WARE it therefore was obvious that the successful company-wide rollout of Microsoft Exchange in 2010 required a consistent backup system to enable greater protection of critical data. PC-WARE s legacy decentralised backup environment consisted of heterogeneous products in a multi-vendor infrastructure. Backup processes were operated on various servers installed at different company locations throughout Germany and other European countries. These processes were very complex and time-consuming, and required a lot of storage capacity. For example, when a document was amended, rather than just storing iterative changes, the entire document was stored again as a new version. After a short but brief analysis of the company s requirements, PC-WARE decided to consolidate its backup and replication activities by replacing the local backup processes with a centralised solution installed at its datacentre in the Leipzig headquarters. PC-WARE itself is well known for innovative and effective ICT solutions, says Deibler. Therefore it was only logical for us to gain the benefits of a consistent backup environment with a single vendor solution. This led to PC-WARE s decision to rollout the CA ARCserve r15 product suite across the company. Solution Centralised solution for efficient backup processes Before the implementation started, PC-WARE carefully analysed and tested all options and features of CA ARCserve r15. The decision to change to the CA Technologies product suite above other solutions was easy for PC-WARE s specialists. We had already been working with some modules of the CA ARCserve solution and were very satisfied, says Deibler. The new version has a number of new features we ve been waiting for. One of them is deduplication, another is the option for the recovery of single Active Directory objects without a restart of the domain controllers. The economical considerations were also important; according to Deibler, the implementation costs for CA Technologies recovery management solutions are far lower than other products. The project started in summer Within a few days PC-WARE s IT team managed to rollout the backup software at all 70 locations of the company worldwide. 03

4 CA ARCserve is currently one of the fastest backup solutions on the market and the agent-based software offers highly effective data security for distributed servers, databases and applications as well as client devices in a heterogeneous environment with different operating systems, such as Windows, LINUX, UNIX and NetWare. CA ARCserve s practical and clearly structured management tools enable PC-WARE to save critical business data via the company s network to a central Network-Attached-Storage-environment (NAS) to ensure high availability. This approach has enabled PC-WARE to maintain consistent security controls and high performance across the entire company. Safeguarding high performance with minimum effort Unlike other backup solutions CA ARCserve r15 supports both virtual and physical servers. CA ARCserve D2D uses a patented technology to allow incremental backups, an option that PC-WARE is going to install within the next few months. Bare Metal Recovery also makes sure that servers can be restored within a few minutes either on new hardware or existing virtual machines. For additional mirroring of backed up data - for example from a remote location to the main datacentre - PC-WARE uses CA ARCserve Replication. CA ARCserve helped us to establish a high-performing, secure backup environment. Oliver Deibler ICT Director, PC-WARE EMEA CA ARCserve High Availability completes the suite. In comparison to previous versions, the CA Technologies high availability solution now enables seamless disaster recovery and data protection in a virtual environment and offers a broad variety of functions for these processes. For example defective virtual machines can be restored with a few and simple steps, which dramatically improves business continuity. With CA ARCserve r15, PC-WARE can now backup data from smaller locations in a shorter timeframe and without any problems even though they are not linked via high-speed connections. In addition the CA Technologies solution offers detailed categorisation of servers, and supports the latest versions of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft SQL, which increases the spectrum of processes that can be executed via CA ARCserve r15. 04

5 Benefit Higher value, lower costs The implementation of CA ARCserve r15 has enabled PC-WARE to centralise the company s backup processes at its Leipzig headquarters, which has dramatically decreased administration. The automation of the backup process has resulted in greater transparency and frees up IT administrators from routine tasks. Today the daily backup of PC-WARE s international locations runs centrally according to the backup-todisc principle. The contents of the NAS are only transferred to tape once a month. Thanks to the implementation of CA ARCserve r15 we ve been able to reduce the volume of tape libraries within our international locations dramatically, comments Deibler. This has resulted in significant cost reduction amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros. Since deploying CA ARCserve r15, PC-WARE has optimised and simplified day-to-day administration of the backup process. Today all management tasks are executed via a central console, which enables administrators to see at a glance if a problem occurs or processes are interrupted. CA ARCserve r15 has delivered added value to PC-WARE by: Reducing the storage space needed for backups by approximately 80 percent. Enabling cost savings through reduced utilisation of tape libraries Reducing the workload for production servers Automating and unifying backup processes across the globe Supporting a secure and efficient backup platform. By reducing the amount of space needed for backed up data through deduplication, PC-WARE has been able to release capacity to production activities, which contributes positively to the company s commercial success. Thanks to CA ARCserve we have reduced the storage space required for backup by 80%. Oliver Deibler ICT Director, PC-WARE EMEA 05

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