Wavenet and its partners provide communications services throughout the UK to over 8000 business clients. The firm has a depth of experience in delivering quality solutions in VoIP, fixed line and intelligent network services. In 2010 to help grow its business, the firm acquired Titan Technology, a rival provider of hosted telephony also based in the Midlands.
Wavenet has run an offsite backup and recovery solution for a number of years, but following the accidental deletion of a large volume of critical files, its legacy backup and recovery solution was found to be slow and cumbersome at restoring the lost data. The disruption to the business, which lasted several weeks, prompted senior management to seek a replacement. Wavenet turned to Discus Systems, a trusted IT supplier the firm had worked with for a number of years, who created a suitable ‘Data Vault Security’ backup and recovery solution using technology from StorageCraft.
“The new system protects all our critical customer account information, service documents and billing in a completely seamless fashion,” explains Darren Lake, Technology Director for Wavenet, “Recovering individual files is just a simple phone call to Discus while a complete server recovery using StorageCraft’s VirtualBoot gets us up and running in around 15 minutes.”
Another critical advantage of the new solution from Discus is the ability to regularly test both onsite server recoveries and the integrity of data held offsite using VirtualBoot. “It is only when you have a problem that the speed of recovery is really tested,” explains Lake, “The new system from Discus has been thoroughly tested and allows us to quickly recover from a major server failure without disrupting our business for more than a couple of hours at most.” The Data Vault Security stores a local copy of all critical data and sends new or changed data continuously offsite via a DSL circuit to an offsite datacenter. “The system eliminates the need for overnight backups and has no noticeable impact on network traffic or server performance – for us, it is the perfect solution for our backup and recovery needs,” Lake adds.
Over the last two years, Discus Systems Plc - a StorageCraft Reseller Partner, have helped a growing client base move away from legacy tape to its Data Vault Security solution, supported by StorageCraft ShadowProtect disaster recovery solutions and its key features including VirtualBoot, HeadStart Restore and Hardware Independent Restore for both physical and virtual environments. “It is surprising how many firms still rely on tape but when disaster inevitably strikes, tape is a somewhat unreliable and slow method for recovering data,” explains Terry Biddulph, MD for Discus Systems Plc, “With DSL becoming faster and more reliable, our offsite Data Vault Security simply becomes a much more effective solution and we are seeing a lot of firms dropping tape completely.”