Claven Group Case Study
The Claven Group is the UK’s leading specialist field visit business, carrying out high quality, reliable, compliant and cost effective home visits for...
Switch from tape saves Claven Group £4,000 per year
IT staff reclaim hours of management time
No more headaches over data growth
The Claven Group is the UK’s leading specialist field visit business, carrying out high quality, reliable, compliant and cost effective home visits for their customers.
The company makes more than 100,000 visits per year on behalf of market leaders in the lending and insurance sectors.
Case Study
Paul Lynes saved £4,000 per year for the Claven Group and freed up hours of management time for IT staff every week by choosing Redstor as the company's new data management providers.
As head of IT, Paul was keen to find an alternative to a time-intensive, tape-based backup solution that had become unmanageable due to data growth.
The UK’s leading field services business was spending an increasing amount of time managing a process that had become costly, complicated and no longer fit for purpose.
Paul said: “Backing up everything was a challenge because fitting all of our data onto tape was difficult. The speed we were able to do a restore was also a problem because tapes were being taken offsite by a third-party company – and we were totally reliant on them whenever we needed them back.”
When backups were encroaching on the business day, Paul sought a sustainable and scalable cloud solution to protect and manage 1TB of data.
Redstor has freed up the Claven Group's IT team to devote more time to driving value for the company
Paul said: “We used to have to go through the process of checking that a backup had worked, pulling the tape before it went offsite and clearing a new tape ready to go on.
“Now with Redstor, we get an email. We check to make sure it says ‘yes’ and apart from that we don’t have to do anything.
"It’s running quite happily without any interference from us. We just don’t have to worry about it.”
- Fitting everything that needed to be backed up onto tape was proving problematic
- High management overheads associated with backing up data, such as spending an hour or more every day sorting out tapes
- Recovering files was typically taking at least a day, and sometimes longer
- Retention and billing complexities
- A data management solution that delivers reliable backup and recovery, archiving, disaster recovery and global search
- Intelligent, policy-driven automation and sophisticated reporting with a centralised management console, offering borderless visibility of entire, complex data estate at any time, on any device
- InstantData, Redstor’s unique on-demand streaming technology
- Transparent and predictable pricing with no hidden costs or surprises
- Confidently meet Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective and easily evidence compliance
- IT team now manage by exception, reducing data management admin from an hour every day to just a few minutes,
- No need to wait a day or more for tapes to come back - stream data in real time to any device, making downtime a thing of the past
- Saved £4,000 annually on system recovery software, easy installation of Redstor, no hardware costs and ability to scale up or down as demand changes
By streaming data in real time to any device, ensuring it is always available instantly, Redstor has made downtime a thing of the past for the Claven Group.
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.”
Redstor helps radically reduce the impact of security incidents, data breaches and hardware failure, with a fast, proven data management service.
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.
From a Disaster Recovery perspective, the ease and simplicity is so much better with Redstor.
We don’t need to think about ensuring we have the right tapes in the right location. We just dial on and start dragging our data down and crucially we’re able to prioritise which files we want. It is much easier now that we can say ‘ok, right, we are going to take these ones first, because the users need these quicker than the rest."
Paul Lynes
“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.”
Borderless visibility of data
What is your biggest challenge around backup and recovery?
- The threat of security incidents and how quickly you can recover
- Time spent on administrative tasks
- Cost of backup technology
- Limitations of legacy backup technology
- Gaining visibility of all of your data
The Claven Group are now able to discover, manage and control all their data across 15 servers, Exchange SQL and in the company’s own bespoke application, which was built and developed in-house and is hosted offsite.
Running on servers, laptops and workstations, with backup selections profiled from the management console, Redstor provides rapid and granular restore for Office 365 and SaaS applications.
Redstor unifies backup, instant data recovery and access, archiving, search and data migration through a secure, central console, enabling borderless visibility of an organisation’s entire, complex data estate at any time, on any device.
The Claven Group now benefit from the latest cloud-based tools, and Paul is safe in the knowledge that the company has best-of-breed data management and protection.
Deployed and configured in 15 minutes, Redstor has quickly made the Claven Group’s data management problems smaller and simpler.
Paul said: “When we were using tapes our daily differential was running overnight from about 8pm until as late as 7am the following morning. Then our full backup kicked off on a Friday and would run through until Sunday.
“Our main objective was to move away from the tape back-up solution because we were recycling 20 per month. We were keeping 12 each year. That was just getting larger and larger. It was very unwieldy to manage.
“Having to store all the tapes offsite was obviously a big thing and we were unable to test all those tapes.
“We did a trial with Redstor and it worked out exactly as we had hoped. We went through several cycles of our backup and were very comfortable that everything was being backed up - so that definitely comforted me. We couldn’t have been happier.”
The Claven Group’s IT team were looking for a solution that was low on administration.
Being able to look after all data from one easy-to-use, central management console and monitor usage at any time, on any device has been of major benefit.
Deployed and configured in 15 minutes, Redstor took the pain and expense out of implementing a data management solution.
Paul said: “There was no on-boarding required after the trial. We just moved straight across. It was very simple for us to do. Everything was done within a week. Adding files and recovering files has been a revelation. We have been very happy with the service.”
Transparent and predictable pricing
Redstor has eliminated the retention and billing complexities that plagued the Claven Group.
Not only are traditional backups costly, complicated and time-consuming, they cannot scale to support the explosion in new apps and growing data sets.
As well as removing manual overheads, Redstor has replaced Claven Group’s dependency on removable media.
With a pricing model that is subscription-based, simple and predictable, Redstor only charges organisations for what is protected – not what Redstor ends up storing as a result of all the incremental backups.
The Claven Group can also now scale up or down as demand changes. There are no hidden costs, no surprises.
We know exactly what we are going to spend and we don’t have to over spec it in terms of making sure we have got capacity because Redstor scales easily as we grow.
"We used to pay monthly costs for tapes to be taken offsite and stored elsewhere and we were also paying out to replace 12 tapes a year because we were keeping the last one of each month as a monthly archive.
"Redstor has probably saved us about £300 per month - that’s what we paid for the system recovery software – so close to £4,000 every year and about £120 for the extra tapes."
Paul Lynes
Expert support
Redstor’s clients have 24/7 access to a support team that draws on 20 years’ knowledge and experience within the storage and backup industry.
Redstor is trusted by more than 40,000 clients around the world to help discover, analyse, control and protect their critical data.
Paul said: “There were one or two other cloud-based providers that we looked at, but we were impressed with the Redstor software and we liked the price. It was very, very simple and we saved money.
"We chose Redstor because of the ease of use, speed and because it was cost effective."
What is your most important consideration when choosing an archiving solution?
- Freeing up capacity and sweating existing assets
- Avoiding archiving on unreliable tape
- Minimising management overheads
- Eliminating delays in accessing archived data
