Johannesburg, 13 Feb 2017
Health and hygiene services provider Bidvest Steiner has been using Redstor backup and recovery solutions for several years to ensure that its mission-critical files on its servers and desktops are protected.
About Bidvest Steiner
Founded in 1954, Bidvest Steiner provides a range of health and hygiene services. These include washroom accessory rentals, deep cleaning, dust and pest control, as well as hygiene, cleaning, and office consumables sales. It has more than 30 branches throughout Southern Africa.
Problem Description
In 2013, Bidvest Steiner replaced its backup solution with Attix5 Backup Pro (which was subsequently acquired in 2015 by Redstor).
"The biggest factor in moving to the Redstor environment was to pro-actively address any potential hardware failures on the aging legacy solution. It was also approaching the time when we needed to consider doing a hardware refresh. The decision was made to rather choose a technology that would be more cost-effective and that provided us with cloud capabilities," says Jan Thuynsma, CIO at Steiner Hygiene.
He says that Bidvest Steiner used the previous system for almost seven years. In that time, there were two failures on the tape solution.
"The associated costs and recovery time were of such a nature that it highlighted the need to move from a tape-based system. Additionally, tapes would always be prone to human error."
As part of this, Bidvest Steiner wanted to use a hosted environment for its servers.
"Initially, we started with server backups using Redstor Backup Pro. Three years ago, the organisation began performing backups from key positions inside the business. As with many companies, most of our data is going through e-mail so that also guided the decision in going with Redstor."
The Solution
"Bidvest Steiner considered several options but decided on Redstor Backup Pro as it provided the organisation with a local area backup for its servers at a time when bandwidth was quite expensive. This bandwidth optimisation is achieved through leveraging the Redstor compression technology," says Thuynsma.
Currently, the organisation is running 12 servers on the Redstor solution with approximately 2TB of data being protected. On the client side, there are more than 130 systems being monitored and backed up.
The Result
Using Redstor, Bidvest Steiner has reported that the speed of its backups has improved. Additionally, its employees can access files much faster than before.
"Redstor works very well for us. We do not have to monitor it on a daily basis as it just works. Once the initial backup is completed, there are no long waiting times for the backing up or restoring of files. Redstor also enables us to conduct bandwidth throttling to ensure our connectivity is optimised and backups do not impact on work performance," says Thuynsma.
He adds that Bidvest Steiner conducts ongoing testing on the backup environment with restores being done in a test environment to make sure that replication is consistent. These tests, Thuynsma says, provides a great audit check for the company as well.
"Using Redstor and its reporting environment provides Bidvest Steiner with peace of mind that our business continuity needs are taken care of. The simplicity of the product and the effectiveness of the restores make it easy for any user to restore in the event of a disaster," he concludes.
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