Less Travel, More Customer Confidence

Less Travel, More Customer
Confidence
Customer profile
TeamLogic IT/Centennial deploys cloud replication solution, giving customers faster
Company
Industry
Country
Website
TeamLogic IT/
Centennial
IT Services
United States
www.teamlogicit.com
/businesses/
centennalco601
Business need
TeamLogic IT/Centennial wanted to
reduce the time and money spent
traveling to customer sites to perform
system backups.
Solution
The company implemented Dell™
backup, replication, and recovery.
Benefits
•
•
•
•
Gives customers hourly server
snapshots and improved file
recovery
Provides reliable cloud replication
and saves time and money
Helps TeamLogic IT/Centennial
Solutions featured
“AppAssure has been really versatile for us.
We’ve got all the data replicated now, and we
love the solution’s ability to natively export to
Hyper-V. We’re confident now that all is going
well.”
David Cawdrey, Chief Technical Architect and Senior Administrator for
TeamLogic IT/Centennial
•
•
•
Backup and Recovery
Disaster Recovery
Virtualization
TeamLogic IT/Centennial is a local
computer services franchise of national
IT provider TeamLogic IT. TeamLogic IT/
Centennial provides computer services
and IT support for small and mediumsize customers in the Colorado cities of
Centennial, Denver, Colorado Springs,
and Golden.
“AppAssure allows
us to look forward.
The continuous
protection
is awesome,
deduplication and
cloud replication
work great, and
virtual machine
multiplatform
exporting makes
our virtual disasterrecovery site work.”
David Cawdrey,
Chief Technical Architect
and Senior Administrator for
TeamLogic IT/Centennial
As an outsourced IT partner for its
computer repair and maintenance,
networking, security, data and
email support. The company’s
unique managed services program,
SystemWatch IT, is a remote diagnostic
system that helps businesses control IT
costs and prevents costly IT disasters.
Struggling to meet customer backup
schedules
Over the years, the TeamLogic IT/
Centennial team has come to know
the Colorado roads well—sometimes
traveling up to 90 minutes one way
just to rotate a customer’s backup tape
onsite. However, resourcing these
geographically disparate companies
is time-consuming and costly for
TeamLogic IT/Centennial—not only
in terms of maintenance of company
vehicles, but also in technician time.
“Our sweet spot is small to medium-size
businesses with 20–30 users which
need a specialized IT person but can’t
Cawdrey, Chief Technical Architect and
Senior Administrator for TeamLogic IT/
Centennial. “We do all the work for them,
including managing backups, reporting,
patches and inventory. We’re their 24/7
IT department. However, because we
can’t dedicate a person to run around
all over the state every day, we’ve tried
to coordinate a schedule where we’d
do customers’ full backups onsite on
Fridays, with incremental backups on
other weeknights.”
However, as the number of TeamLogic
IT/Centennial customers grew, the
customers every Friday night. “We
modified the backup schedules and
2
rotations to lengthen the time between
onsite visits, but that meant driving
around Colorado every day, which was
states Cawdrey. Because the company
is committed to IT consistency for
its customers, it realized this backup
process was not sustainable in the long
term, particularly if the company wanted
to grow profits and expand its business.
Searching for a virtualized backup and
recovery solution
To meet these challenges, TeamLogic
IT/Centennial began to search for a
new solution that would improve its
ability to handle its customers’ backup
and recovery needs. “In the past, we
used Acronis primarily if a client didn’t
have any other backup software,” says
Cawdrey. “Or we’d use whatever was
preexisting in the environment, such as
Symantec Backup Exec™. But we were
really looking for something we could
replicate the applications so we wouldn’t
have to do this crazy scheduling.”
The company focused on cloud
technologies. “We wanted a cloudbased backup solution to put the
data in a safe space via wide area
network links,” says Cawdrey. “The
other products we used just weren’t
giving us what we needed and, with
the growth of our customer pool, we
poorly managed backups.” He and his
team evaluated several technologies
to see if those solutions could provide
reliable backup, replication, and ease
of use in one system. “We reviewed
and actually implemented R1 Soft, but
its tools didn’t have native restore
ability to Hyper-V environments. The R1
toolset is more geared toward ESX and
Technology at work
Software
Dell™ AppAssure
UNIX/Linux solutions,” says Cawdrey.
Knowing that TeamLogic IT/Centennial
was committed to staying ahead of the
virtualization curve, Cawdrey continued
his search for a solid product for backup
and disaster recovery that would serve
clients and help sustain profitability for
the company.
Gives customers hourly server
snapshots and improved file recovery
TeamLogic IT/Centennial settled on
Dellt AppAssure, a solution that provides
fast backup, replication and recovery.
“With AppAssure, the key outstanding
features and attributes for us are cloud
replication and the ability to restore
virtually anything,” says Cawdrey.
Cawdrey’s team can now set the
AppAssure solution to take hourly
snapshots of clients’ critical servers,
allowing them to easily recover files that
would not have made it into a previous
standard nightly backup. “You can’t
imagine the gratitude our clients have
when they learn we can recover 4–6
hours of work that was accidentally
deleted from their file share,” says
Cawdrey. “Our old system used to break
down and replication was handled
via third-party tools that would also
periodically break down. With AppAssure,
we use the email reports to keep tabs
on what’s happening at each client site
and routinely check on our replication
site for any errors. The solution has been
very stable for us.”
Provides reliable cloud replication and
saves time and money
Dell AppAssure natively supports the
restoring of files to TeamLogic IT/
Centennial’s Windows Server® 2008
Hyper-V™ cloud, located in a SunGard
data center. The result is reliable cloud
replication. “Having unlimited backup
capabilities, along with deduplication
and cloud replication, is awesome,” says
Cawdrey.
Cawdrey and his team now spend much
less time in cars traveling to client sites,
and a lot more time working on other
client issues. This enables TeamLogic
IT/Centennial to drive up billing and
service availability. “AppAssure is very
competitive and allows us to keep our
costs down,” says Cawdrey.
methodologies while delivering
accelerated backups, fast local
recoveries and disaster recovery.
as its premium backup and replication
option. “We replicate client backups
to our data-center space and set up
continuous VM exports at the disasterrecovery site,” explains Cawdrey. “If the
client’s system goes down, we simply
activate those virtual machines, perform
a bit of network modification and grant
access with VPN or Terminal Services.”
Helps TeamLogic IT/Centennial
Also, as TeamLogic IT/Centennial has
discovered, AppAssure is intuitive for
Microsoft administrators, and it’s easy to
use. “AppAssure has been really versatile
for us,” says Cawdrey. “We’ve got all the
data replicated now, and we love the
solution’s ability to natively export to
Hyper-V. We’re confident that all is going
well.”
Recently, Cawdrey performed a fullblown disaster-recovery test with
SunGard technology. The exported
virtual machines worked flawlessly
and TeamLogic IT/Centennial’s client
environment and the cloud. “We had
continuous exports to virtual machines,
we configured Hyper-V, and we also
moved physical files from export archive
to live server. It was about 400 GB of
total data, and the entire process was
relatively quick and easy,” says Cawdrey.
The Dell AppAssure enterprise-class
backup-and-recovery software,
designed for Windows Server 2008
Hyper-V environments, supports both
host-level and guest-level backup
Dell AppAssure is now TeamLogic IT/
Centennial’s upgrade backup solution,
with virtual disaster recovery provided
as an add-on service. “Both of these
and medium-size providers, and they
generate additional revenue and sales
opportunities,” says Cawdrey. “Recently,
we had a situation where a big client had
a data loss — a finance director deleted
a document after four hours of work.
We had to tell them that unfortunately,
because they were on the legacy backup
system with nightly backups, the data
was gone. We then told them about
AppAssure.”
Cawdrey and his team are now ahead
of the curve in the managed service
provider market. “AppAssure allows us to
look forward,” he says. “The continuous
protection is awesome, deduplication
and cloud replication work great, and
virtual machine multiplatform exporting
makes our virtual disaster-recovery site
work. No other product we’ve found
does all of these things together.”
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MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS CASE STUDY. Reference number: 10012296