InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
January 11, 1999
Backup Plans Become CriticalCompanies find data recovery software helps save them time, money
By Jennifer Mateyaschuk
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s John Higby, director of IS for Landstar Corp., left his Jacksonville, Fla., office one night last year, he noticed storm clouds on the horizon. He barely gave them a second thought. He should have--the tempest threatened the very survival of the $1.4 billion company, which transports everything from munitions to public school textbooks.Landstar's business depends on 120 Gbytes of shipping, tracking, billing, and customer information stored in the company's data center. That night, the weight of rainwater and an air conditioning unit caused the roof of one of the company's four buildings to collapse. More than 50,000 gallons of water poured into the data center.
But Landstar was able to recover completely from the disaster within four days because a few months earlier, it had installed Computer Associates' ArcServe 6.5 for Windows NT to automatically back up, on Hewlett-Packard servers, not just customer billing and shipment tracking information, but also E-mail and Microsoft Word files. The data is saved on tape provided by Storage Technology Corp., and the tapes are taken off-site every night to a secure, fireproof vault 26 miles from Landstar's campus. Without this system, Higby says with no hint of irony, "we would have been dead in the water."
Soon, companies that want to be competitive won't be able to afford to have their systems down for even four days. A recent report by Gartner Group Inc. says the growing emphasis on customer satisfaction will force companies to reduce the time it takes to recover critical processes and application systems to 24 hours by 2003. Noncritical systems will need to be back up in four days.
However, effective data backup is becoming increasingly difficult as companies become less centralized, adopt hardware running a variety of operating systems, have more remote computer users, and depend more heavily on information. IT departments are now looking to back up not just mainframe systems and applications, but also data from workstations, notebooks, PC LANs, and application servers--regardless of their operating systems. They also want to reduce the downtime while data is being backed up, as well as the amount of time it takes to recover from a system failure.
Peak Performance
For companies that consider customer service a competitive advantage, downtime is lost business. Late last summer, Visa International Inc., in Foster City, Calif., finished installing EMC Corp.'s TimeFinder software for backing up data. Visa says the product helped its systems operate at maximum performance during the holiday shopping season.
TimeFinder creates multiple copies of data for backups, data warehouse loading, and year 2000 testing--and does it all while a system remains online. Once a job is completed, copies of the data are automatically synchronized with the primary data.
Using TimeFinder, Visa backed up 2 terabytes of data in 15 minutes, compared with the 10 hours it took previously. Because there was no downtime while data was being backed up, the company says, TimeFinder contributed directly to better customer service and increased revenue. It also helped Visa cut down on the money it was spending to test its data backup plan twice a year.
Today, effective backup strategies don't just reduce downtime; they account for the changing nature of business. More employees are working remotely and using notebooks as their primary computers. Because these users aren't tied to a network, IT departments have a harder time managing and controlling data on their machines. Plus, notebooks can easily be lost, stolen, or damaged. As a result, some companies are beginning to implement software that backs up data from remote users.
About 70% of GTE Internetworking's machines are notebooks. The company is adding 150 machines every month, about 110 of which are for mobile users. Much of the information stored on these computers--including E-mail messages, spreadsheet data, contract information, and customer information--is vital to the company's business, says Jay Corinha, director of IT business planning and communications for GTE Internetworking.
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