Case Study: DRA Advisors

It's every IT administrator-s worst nightmare: a critical server goes down on a Sunday morning. Thanasi Ziros at Beyond Medical USA, a provider of medical devices and supplies, noticed an abnormal console warning on one of the company's five servers, and restarted it to clear the problem. That made matters worse: when he couldn't even log in after the restart he checked the server and found two hard drives were not responding.

Since the server hosts several virtual servers, this meant that more than 20 users would now be locked out. If this has happened one month earlier, Thanasi would have been forced to restore from backup tapes, a process that would likely have been fraught with hassle and frustration. He would have had to fetch the tapes from an offsite location, and then spend the better part of two days diligently restoring the server from tape archives.

But, luckily, he had recently switched his backup plans to Storage Guardian's cloud backup service, coupled with a local disk for fast restoration of crucial server and user files.

"Once I had pulled a drive from another machine to get the server operational, I called Storage Guardian. The tech stepped me through the process of restoring local data from an always-available local disk," says Thanasi. "Then, Storage Guardian expressed me a drive with 20GB of data and 25 user profiles. Once that had been loaded, I was up and running with zero data loss."

In addition to ensuring business continuity for Beyond Medical, Storage Guardian helps the company conform to HIPAA regulations by maintaining accurate data records - offsite and encrypted - 24x7x365.

Thanasi adds that the Storage Guardian service is not just dependable, it's a big time-saver. He adds: "One thing we're not missing these days: the daily ritual of creating backup tapes and then taking them home every night."