This is of great benefit when Paul’s IT team need to recover files that users have unwittingly deleted or overwritten.
He said: “Previously we had to retrieve the desired tapes from storage. Although there was a Service Level Agreement, we were still beholden to a third-party to bring the tapes back. “If you were recovering data, you might find that you needed to do it from two or three tapes. There were times when we might be given the wrong information and request the wrong one, so we would then have to wait again for the right tape. “The best-case scenario was getting a tape delivered the next day. Often, because you couldn’t look at the files, you could only see the names inside the backup exec software, there was an element of guessing. “A person might say ‘I need this file recovered from the Tuesday’ then say ‘oh, actually I meant Monday’ so we were reliant on the user.
Now with Redstor we’re pulling files down before the tape would have even finished indexing.
“If someone wants access to a folder, being able to map directly to it is great because then we’re not sat with them, saying ‘right, do you need this file or this?’ They can do it themselves. That’s an added feature that we probably wouldn’t have thought we wanted but love it now it’s there.”
With unique, user-driven streaming technology, the Claven Group no longer need to wait for a full recovery of all their data. At the click of a button, the company is able to get up and running within seconds, not days. Paul said: “We’ve done our own Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective and I can meet those with Redstor. I probably would not have been able to meet those targets using tape. Trying to get all of our data off tape was far too time-consuming. Beforehand we were doing daily differentials so we had to make sure we had at least Friday’s tape and whatever other ones we wanted. Then we had to index the entire tapes and recover from those, which is slow.
“We can get departments up and running significantly quicker than we could before because previously we couldn’t do anything until the indexing completed - and that could take a couple of hours. You’d have to wait for the tape to catalogue everything before you could even be in a place where you could start thinking about recovering.”
“We’ve done two DR tests this year and we’ve monitored how quickly it would take us to bring files down. If the worst came to the worst, and users were desperate for us to get hold of something for them, we know we could do that.”