Introduction

This Luxury Hotel Management and Operating Company controls over 20 hotels and resorts in North America. The company operates approximately 180 servers that serve a wide variety of systems and applications from Property Management Systems (PMS), Email, Back Office Accounting, Sales and Catering, file sharing, web servers and other common hospitality and business applications. The company operates a predominately Windows based computing infrastructure with elements of Mac and Linux in minority and hosts a number of applications at two data centers.

The Challenge

The company’s backup infrastructure was becoming increasingly problematic. Backup at the hotels and data centers was exceeding the backup window, even using an approach that allowed for the backup of a server to multiple tape drives. Backup of an increasing number of servers and mobile users was also a problem. The existing approach was to use CA ARCserve to backup the files, databases and e-mail to tape. However, because there were not always skilled IT professionals at the remote locations, the management of the tapes lacked discipline and often resulted in problems in finding the right tape when a recovery was required. Disaster recovery for server data was identified as a concern that needed to be addressed. And on top of all this, the amount of data that needed to be protected was growing, so the problem was expected to continue and worsen.

The cost of maintaining a best practice and compliant backup schedule was also on the increase. The number of tapes that needed to be replaced each month, quarter and year was steadily on the increase as was the failure rate of aging tape drive hardware and the maintenance pricing of ARCServe backup software. In addition with an increasing number of servers, desktops and laptops requiring to be backed up, the licensing costs for additional backup agents was expected to rise. The last cost of significance was also related to the collection, off site storage and tape retrieval (in the event of a restore). This service was proving to be expensive, time consuming for the IT staff and resulted in a slow time to restore in the event that old tapes were required to retrieve data.

The Approach

As part of a review of the organization’s disaster recovery and business continuity standards, a new approach to data backup and recovery was included in the project. The company wanted to modernize its approach to backup, with LokkBox or with another technology. The new design required replacement of the tape backup approach with an online backup solution that would send the backup to a secure, off site location but allow for encrypted backups to be performed locally to disk as well if required. The solution needed to accommodate the various bandwidth constraints of remote locations and support Windows, Mac, Linux, Microsoft SQL, Open files, Microsoft Exchange and Windows versions ranging from 2000 to 2008 and all in between. After talks with LokkBox, researching on the Internet, meeting with competing companies and comparing services with the biggest and most renowned online backup providers, the company chose LokkBox Online Backup for field trials. Working directly with LokkBox, a selection of servers was setup for off site and local backups at a number of sites throughout the company. Each of the two data centers and the corporate office were also tested thoroughly. The size of the test backup data was 250GB.

The LokkBox Online Backup Manager (OBM) was installed on Windows 2003, 2008, XP, Vista and Mac hosts for the preliminary trial. These machines represented a mixture of basic file backup, Microsoft SQL backup, Microsoft Active Directory and Domain Controller System State backup and Microsoft Exchange backup. Initial backups were performed quickly and without error and after this initial period the backup windows of most sites were reduced to less than one hour. Customized retention policies were implemented to mirror traditional tape rotation policies of keeping 7 daily tapes, 4 weekly tapes, 12 monthly tapes, 8 quarterly tapes and 10 yearly tapes. Setup for each machine / host took less than 10 minutes.

The Results

With almost a year of production use of LokkBox, the project has successfully met and continues to meet all of its goals. Tape support requirements were eliminated for all locations as well as off site storage services form 3rd parties. Every site has the ability and responsibility of managing the process and the data but the Corporate IT staff manages reporting and central configuration control. The help desk now has ready access to the data to speed recoveries as was evidenced in the first weeks of operation with LokkBox: A failure in a PMS database required the complete restoration of an SQL database and associated transaction logs and this was achieved within one hour of the restore being deemed required. It is estimated that this process could have taken up to 24 hours or more with the previous tape backup solution with no guarantee of restore success from the tape.

Moving to an online based backup process with advanced features has allowed the company to meet its backup windows, meet regulatory and internal audit compliance, improve its recovery speed and disaster recovery process, and allows for management of the process with the same staff in less time, even as the number of servers and the amount of data has grown.

Most importantly, the cost for the online backup solution is now less than the company was paying for the tape based backup solution. Additional clients are being added to the backup schemes on a regular basis with no additional charge for client software due to the LokkBox policy of unlimited clients per account.

Critical Success Factors

The company identified the following as key to the project’s success:

*The LokkBox pricing was extremely affordable and simple which allowed the company to realize an immediate monthly ROI compared to the old tape based backup system

*The compatibility with Operating systems, databases and applications meant that the company could be confident of LokkBox being able to backup all information critical to the business and at no extra cost than the monthly subscription
*LokkBox’s ‘in-file delta’ backup technology provided the necessary solution to meet tight backup window times by dramatically reducing the amount of data that needed to be processed each evening

*Centralized monitoring, configuration and reporting was immediately delivered by LokkBox’s unique web based account management portal and allows Corporate IT staff to manage their entire backup infrastructure from a single point

*The flexibility to perform a simultaneous backup to local storage of the company’s choosing provided an additional layer of protection. This local backup allowed for large amounts of data to be stored locally for immediate, LAN based restore. Alternatively, the web restore feature of LokkBox allowed for the company to securely and quickly restore any file from any location to any other location

*No other online backup provider was able to offer the combination of low cost, feature rich, easy to use and proven service