Meyer Group Protects Office and Laptop Data Using Asigra’s Online Backup and Recovery Software

Asigra™, the technology leader in agentless backup and recovery software for service providers targeting the growing managed storage services market, today announced that managed services provider, Stack Computer Solutions Limited, has deployed Asigra’s agentless distributed backup and recovery software, Televaulting™, to provide an all-encompassing solution for Meyer Group to protect its entire array of company data online and offsite. Asigra Televaulting is also protecting the data generated from remote laptop users connected to the company’s network. Meyer Group is a market leader in gourmet cookware and kitchenware.

Prior to employing the services of Stack, Meyer Group was using a Veritas tape-based backup solution. Switching to disk-to-disk from tape was essential for Meyer Group to ensure all the company data was backed up in a single solution, as well as to increase the speed of the backup and recovery and guarantee a 100% success rate in retrieving lost data. Meyer Group also wanted emails to be included in the backups, so they didn’t have to be backed up on a per PC basis, as with the previous solution. It was also important for Meyer Group to be able to restore data at the message level, which Stack could provide, using Asigra Televaulting’s MLR (Message Level Restore) feature.

“We wanted to ensure that all of our data was stored securely offsite and in one place, from which it could be easily and quickly retrieved if necessary,” said David Cross, IT Manager for Meyer Group. “The Asigra software that Stack presented us matched our requirements and exceeded them by far. The service facilitates all of the platforms we use and it includes our remote users to substantially decrease our backup and restore times. We also have peace of mind with the Stack service because the data can’t be lost or stolen, unlike tape-based solutions.”

Stack provides Meyer Group with Asigra’s offsite backup and recovery software as a service, as well as a disaster recovery testing service to ensure business continuity in the event of server damage or failure. Stack is now backing up all emails, laptops, excel-based files, databases specific to the company, customer information, online transaction information, DB2 and SQL databases. The Asigra software supports all the platforms Meyer Group uses, including AS/400, Windows, Netware and Linux.

According to Steve Cobham, technical director for Stack, “The main reason Meyer Group chose our service was the quality of Asigra’s underlying technology and the level of service we were able to offer in terms of ensuring disaster recovery objectives. Meyer Group particularly needed to protect its customer data and its emails, and we were able to fulfil both of these stipulations and provide further services Meyer Group wasn’t aware were available. Another advantage of the Asigra software is the simplicity of the billing structure – we only charge for the amount of data stored on a monthly basis and not on a per-agent or per-feature basis.”

At the main office site, a single Asigra Televaulting DS-Client software identifies all servers, desktops and laptops connected to the local network and automates the backup of all local data assets. A Lite Client is installed on roaming laptops to ensure backup while travelling. Users establish preferences as to when to begin or continue a backup when signing on outside of the network. Before a backup data set is transmitted to Stack’s data center, Asigra Televaulting software analyzes the data, finds new and changed file blocks, eliminates duplicate files and further compresses the residue bytes to ensure the backup set is as compact as possible. The software then encrypts the data before sending it over an IP- connection to a centralized Asigra Televaulting DS-System server, located in Stack’s data center, which consolidates the backup data from all distributed sites. Data is encrypted in-flight and at-rest, to ensure the data cannot be tampered with. The DS-System server is protected like other servers within the data center as determined by the organization’s ongoing data protection policies. Moreover, the back-end DS-System server integrates directly with third-party ILM solutions from the major storage vendors.

“A company like Meyer Group needs to ensure that critical data, such as customer data, is protected and retrievable at all times, in order to stay ahead of the competition,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice-president of Asigra. “Our software combined with Stack’s services gives them the assurance of true business continuity if a systems failure should occur.”

Key Stack Service Features:

Agentless Architecture: All of Stack’s solutions are fully agentless. To protect an entire organization’s data, only one piece of software running on one device across the network is needed. Asigra’s disk-based WAN-optimized architecture shatters the limitations of traditional distributed-backup software as all backups are highly secure, being disk-to-disk and with up to 256 AES encryption of data in-flight and at-rest. The software provides grid-based performance and capacity scaling for virtually unlimited data growth, allowing the software to support any backup load and multiple platforms and operating systems including Windows, Linux, UNIX, MAC, Novell, VMware and IBM, without the need to install and configure separate clients.

Bare Metal Restore: Any disaster that destroys a computer system requires a bare metal restore to ensure the minimum downtime and disruption to a business. Once new hardware has been configured with a fresh operating system of the same family as the original computer, users can then restore the complete system, including: data, profiles, registry & system state, programs and service pack files from Local Storage.

Local Storage: The Local Storage module can help address disaster recovery requirements by saving a copy of the latest version of files at a local storage location. If a restore is needed, the file can be quickly restored from the local environment, at LAN speed, without connecting to the online data vault.

Message Level Restore: In addition to the full “hot” Exchange, Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes backups, individual e-mails, contacts & calendar items can also be restored while users are logged into their Outlook, Novell or Lotus Notes. As the backup is incremental, restores can be done on any of the generations of data stored in the online vault.

About Meyer Group

Meyer Group Ltd was founded in the UK in the early 1980’s and over the past twenty years, has become the market leader in gourmet cookware and is now the UK’s largest manufacturer and supplier of kitchenware using high quality brands such as Anolon and Circulon.

In 1997 one of the affiliates of Meyer Group Ltd purchased the Prestige brand name. For over 50 years the Prestige brand had become synonymous with household cooking in the UK and many export markets. Since the acquisition, Prestige has been re-established and re-invigorated as a major brand of products known for their quality, performance and value.

Meyer Group affiliates have been designing, manufacturing and marketing cookware on a global scale since 1971. Combined, they sell over 100 cookware lines in more than 30 countries, and employ more than 5,000 people worldwide. Affiliates are located in the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, Thailand, China, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand, Canada and Japan.

For more information, please visit www.meyergroup.co.uk.    

About Stack

Founded in 1979, Stack boasts an impressive client list, including leading companies such as Meyer. Its brand name has gained an international reputation by providing complete client satisfaction and value for money to customers from small businesses to multinationals alike.

By investing in Stack, customers can guarantee superior performance. As independent providers of bespoke IT solutions they can guide customers through the minefield of systems, products and solutions available.

Stack employs leading technologies and platforms such as Asigra to ensure that customers receive the highest quality services. They are recognized by most strategic players in the computing industry as expert partners.

For more information please visit www.stack.co.uk

About Asigra

Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office online backup/recovery with more than three petabytes of data under protection. Since 1986, the company’s agentless Televaulting solution has centralized data management and eliminated the pricing and performance problems created by agent-based tape backup software in multi-site enterprises. Televaulting addresses government and international regulatory compliance demands by backing up remote/branch office data to the data centre.  Data is encrypted in-flight over the WAN and at rest. Privately held Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with partner offices located worldwide. Asigra products are distributed in the UK through Zycko.

For more information, visit www.asigra.com.