Most people think of a “disaster” as something catastrophic and geographically widespread— an earthquake, fire, flood, or tornado, for example. Truth is, the disasters that cost global business the most don’t fit the traditional definition of catastrophe.
Tivoli FastbBack: Pacific Northern Gas
About the Customer:
Pacific Northern Gas (PNG) owns and operates a natural gas transmission and distribution utility in northern British Columbia, supplying gas to approximately 40,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in British Columbia. Three large industrial customers (West Fraser Mills Ltd., Rio Tinto Alcan and B.C. Hydro) account for approximately 29 percent of total gas deliveries and 6 percent of the company’s operating revenues.
Challenges:
PNG is a mid-size utility, which is subject to rigorous government regulation. As a result, they are required to closely manage and retain historical data and have comprehensive backup and disaster recovery technology to comply with strict auditing requirements. PNG previously used a hosted backup and recovery system. Challenged by high monthly costs, limited bandwidth and a disaster recovery time of several days for their 15 servers, PNG began searching for a cost effective disk-based backup and restore solution.
Business Needs:
PNG wanted a cost-effective solution that would reduce disaster recovery time from days to hours while maintaining a backup window of approximately 8 -10 hours. Unfortunately, their initial search led to cost-prohibitive solutions, some of which were priced at about $100,000 per year, plus maintenance fees.
Business Solution:
After an online search, Martin Saunders, Senior Network Administrator, discovered IBM Tivoli FastBack. After meeting with the IBM Business Partner Raven Bay Services, and seeing a demonstration of the product, PNG chose Raven Bay to implement and customize the software for their operation. FastBack provides PNG with an efficient, secure, continuous, and cost-effective backup and restore solution that is easy to learn, use and maintain. The solution provides the functionality to automate and perform full, incremental or continuous backups to manage critical back-up requirements for daily, weekly, monthly or yearly schedules. From planning and preparation, to implementation and execution, Raven Bay delivered a powerful backup and restore environment complimented by customer focused service, documentation and training that is customized to their unique environment – with the majority of the work done remotely.
Business Results:
Now, from their new disaster recovery site in Vancouver, PNG manages automated procedures for faster and more efficient performance of routine backups. Key business data is protected and systems can be restored within hours, instead of days. FastBack also enables Bare Machine Recovery to virtual machines to significantly reduce the time necessary to perform a server restore on different hardware or virtual system. Besides the initial three-day post-implementation support, maintenance and support is handled on a per-use basis, with no ongoing costs.
IBM Tivoli FastBack was very low cost when compared to the other solutions quoted to us. The software is very easy to learn, and it just runs. Raven Bay was a great business partner that provided a painless implementation. We were really happy with their service, and their support was always available. We like the flexibility that we no longer have to bring in extra hardware, and the ability for FastBack to perform bare machine recovery is a big plus for us. We can get a machine that’s gone down back up and running within an hour. MS Exchange email and calendar restore is fantastic – we can have our data back within five minutes.
– Martin Saunders, Senior Network Administrator, Pacific Northern Gas Ltd.
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