PPC takes control of its backups with CA ARCserve

PPC has consolidated the management and control of its backups across a highly distributed computing environment using CA ARCserve Management Capacity Licence, from CA Southern Africa. This licence allows PPC to purchase a single licence for its multiple offices and manufacturing facilities across Africa, based on the amount of data to be backed up, rather than number of sites or servers.

As one of the continent's leading manufacturers of cement, PPC operates a number of manufacturing sites as well as a head office in Johannesburg and regional offices.

Each site is responsible for its own infrastructure following clear group standards. While each site used CA ARCserve for its backups in line with corporate policy, each site had its own licence and operated its own version of the software. Reporting across this heterogeneous environment was also poor, making it hard for IT management to monitor the state of backups in real-time.

It was also difficult to manage so many licences, each with its own renewal cycle.

"For PPC, the solution was a single licence based on the amount of data backed up - the number of sites or servers involved thus became irrelevant," says Andy Podrenek, account manager at CA Southern Africa. "This means that each site has the latest version of the software covered by one contract."

This approach not only streamlines the management of the backups across the PPC group, it enables accurate, simple reporting to IT management at head office. For example, if a backup at any of the sites fails, the system will automatically send an e-mail citing the reason for the failure to the person responsible, who can then take remedial action. Moreover, head office also automatically gets a view of this through the management consol.

"Regular, reliable backups are a foundation of a corporate IT system, particularly one that is distributed like ours is," says Robert Folmer, service delivery manager at PPC. "The CA ARCserve Management Capacity Licence means that the whole process can be managed centrally, and runs on the same version of the software. We now have a single version of the backup truth."