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Follow on Google News | MSP Recovers Data for Clients in Hours, Not Days, Using AppAssure's Replay 4MSP finds a solid, reliable, cost-effective, and flexible backup & disaster recovery offering for their clients in AppAssure’s award-winning Replay 4 software.
By: AppAssure Software, Inc. Five Nines (or 99.999%) is an industry term for consummate reliability, equivalent to approximately 5 minutes and 15 seconds a year of unscheduled downtime. From its two locations in Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska, and with its 25-person team, Five Nines co-founders Nick Bock and James Bowen boldly leverage IT resources to make sure its corporate name translates to reality to their clients. “As a managed service provider (MSP), we customize unique solutions for our customers in a market that often provides generic IT services,” says Bock. From Blackberry to full server support, Five Nines basically functions as the IT department for its more than 250 customers. Five Nines goes beyond the traditional MSP approach of asking how many users need to be supported (the “How many laptops; how many employees” questions) and partners with its clients to understand the skill-sets of staff within the unique complexities of the environment. This approach is what landed Five Nines on Inc. Magazine’s 500 List of Top Small Businesses in 2009. But even with all this customization and the accolades, what continued to haunt Brock and Bowen was not having a rock solid, reliable, cost-effective, flexible backup and disaster recovery offering for their clients. “For any MSP, the biggest issue is always, backup, but we had specific criteria that our current solutions weren’t meeting and we thought the best we could do is cobble something together ourselves,” notes Bock. Five Nines’ specific, non-negotiable criteria included: - Image-based backup - Good off-site mechanisms - Granular recall for both Exchange and SQL - Reliable and verifiable - Possible deduplication - Absolutely cost effective - Flexibility “At a peer group meeting awhile ago with other MSP companies like Five Nines,” continues Bock, “we noticed that we were all in the same situation. So the group spent a 2-3 hour session talking about all the products, issues, solutions that were on the market. And nothing matched what we needed.“ Bowen adds, “Some solutions promised image-based backup but couldn’t go granular if we included the features of disaster recovery. We needed off site BUT needed granular too. It seemed as if we couldn’t get it all.” As Five Nines states, they used Acronis with some of its clients, but found it didn’t solve their needs alone. “It did with Kaseya, but we kept running into problems with VSS snapshotting and new versions,” says Bowen. And with Symantec, they add, issues with synchronization off site kept cropping up. “Both of these solutions don’t have the dedupe we wanted so the differential is so big that we can’t offsite it without cranking clients’ internet connection to a non cost-effective solution.” Avamar, which impressed the team for being image based and designed around offsite, didn’t provide a local copy of the backup, the team realized. They needed both local and offsite copies for their clients. “We were lost, like everyone else, trying to solve these issues for our clients, since there didn’t seem to be one solution. We looked for at least nine months before we found Replay,” notes Bock. After a rigorous testing process, Bowen and Brock chose Replay as their disaster recovery and backup offering going forward. “We’ Recently, one of Five Nines’ healthcare clients switched over to Replay, right before the physical hardware crashed. “They had a brand new server running Windows Small Business Server 2008,” says Bowen, “with a virtual server on top of that using VMware. We went down to look at the server, and in addition to having to fix the hardware, we checked if the backups were any good. Unfortunately, the crashed core server had all the information about the backup. The offsite backups were good though, and within an hour we had our material.” Bowen was curious though and implemented a disaster recovery solution offsite to migrate the backup copy of the server to the offsite location just to see what would happen. After the team fixed the hardware and everything seemed fine, lingering problems with the server that crashed showed up a few days later. With so much file corruption and lots of other little problems, Five Nines decided it wasn’t in their client’s best interest to continue with a post-crash server. Because Bowen had the off-site server up and running, they migrated user files and ultimately swapped out the faulty server out so there was no file corruption. “Replay made it possible and easy. Instead of a couple of days of doing disaster recovery, I knew my options immediately,” The Five Nines team couldn’t be happier. “We had specific criteria that we were looking for and until we found Replay, we were spending a lot of our time piecing together insufficient solutions. Replay lives up to what it says it does: image- based backup, flexible on-demand recoveries to wherever we need, ease of administrative verification and off site replication,” Right now, Five Nine puts all of its new clients on Replay, and the company is going through the existing client base and converting other customers to Replay whenever possible. “Our end goal,” says Bock, “is to have every client converted to Replay as soon as possible.” Companies can download a free 14-day trial of the award-winning Replay 4 at: http://landing.appassure.com/ # # # About AppAssure Software AppAssure Software is a provider of innovative backup and disaster recovery software purpose-built for Windows applications. Designed to protect the applications, not just the data, AppAssure solutions deliver high-value features for reliable data protection that is corruption-free. As a result, IT administrators can have the confidence that their Windows applications are completely protected and easily recoverable in the event of data loss or disaster. AppAssure’s flagship product, Replay 4 is an application- End
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