When we undertook a major review of our IT Disaster Recovery arrangements we sought proposals from a number of vendors. It was an interesting experience, some of the vendors offered to charge us to for their time just to prepare their proposal !!, while the costs for some of the other proposals were just astronomical.
ZEB’s Level 2 Disaster Recovery option was not only the cheapest proposal, but was also innovative and unique in its use of technology and demonstrated a clear understanding of our existing infrastructure and processes.
The clincher was that ZEB offered a 30 day “risk-free” pilot, where they would implement their solution (both on-site and off-site components) and provide a live trial for 30 days at no cost to Royal Wolf. If their solution did not work the way that they described, then we could walk away without incurring any cost. The Pilot worked flawlessly and we have conducted a number of tests since as well.
Because e-mail is so important to the running of our business, management have recently approved a High Availability option for our Exchange server which provides real-time replication and failover within 15 minutes.
Andrew Williams
Manager IT & T
Royal Wolf Trading Australia Pty Ltd
http://www.royalwolf.com.au
Byrons Chartered Accountants
The partners were keen to have a Disaster Recovery Plan that exceeded ASIC's minimum requirements. Over time we had examined a number of options that were not suitable: either beyond our budget, or provided the base facilities but required us to restore our system from scratch onto their "bare metal" hardware.
We wanted a "managed solution" where the service provider would be responsible for managing the off-site servers and making them available within 24 hours of a disaster at our premises. Essentially we were looking for an "enterprise" disaster recovery service on a budget.
ZEB offered a range of managed solutions that were affordable. We conducted an inspection of their Data Centre and they were able to answer all of our questions.
ZEB proposed a Level 2 solution, which provides a "hot backup" site where our Standby Servers would be available within 4 hours of a disaster. Since the Disaster Recovery system has been implemented we have conducted a number of off-site tests to verify that the system works and recently we used the system to migrate our production servers to new hardware.
Alan Quinlan
IT Manager
Byrons Chartered Accountants
http://www.byrons.com.au
Glanville Architects
We used to have a tape backup system in place. As a backup solution it was far from ideal as the tape drive did not have the capacity to backup all our data onto a single tape which meant that we had to implement a "selective" backup. Plus on top of that because the tape had to be changed nightly, we generally missed at least one backup per fortnight. We never did a test restore of the whole system to verify that in the event of a 'disaster' we could rely on our backups to rebuild our system.
ZEB recommended their Online Backup System to replace our tape backup. The system is completely automatic, there are no tapes to change, no backups are ever missed. The backup system has the capacity for all of our data, so every night the backup is a "full" backup. The backup system has been great, it works without any effort on my part. Periodically when we need to restore some deleted files there have not been any problems.
ZEB also implemented a Level 1 Disaster Recovery plan for us where they image our servers and perform periodic test restores off-site to their Standby Servers to verify that the backups actually work.
About 6 months ago when we were working on an important tender, at about 6pm one of our servers crashed and then refused to restart. We called ZEB who came on-site and determined that there was a serious hardware problem with our server. ZEB then performed a restore of the server to one of their Standby Servers overnight. The next day when everyone arrived at work the Standby Server was working "business as usual" and we were able to submit the tender on time.
While the server failure was inconvenient, thanks to ZEB it wasn't a disaster.
John Perry
Office Manager
Glanville Architects
http://www.cgarch.com.au
Battery Energy
It is imperative that Battery Energy has a strong IT capability but the business is of a size where it is not commercially viable to maintain an in-house IT capability.
Battery Energy has been using ZEN for over 6 years for the outsourced provision of IT support and off-site backup.
Their services and recommendations over this time have provided Battery Energy with an invaluable and reliable extension of the IT function for the business.
Gaby Peimer
General Manager
Battery Energy
http://www.batteryenergy.com.au