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| Ngaging with Interxion Established in 2001 ngage Solutions is a not-for-profit privately-owned company focused on the delivery of publicly-funded services for the benefit of aspiring entrepreneurs, businesses and communities in Oxfordshire and North Buckinghamshire. Based in Thame, ngage currently employs over 60 people working closely with budding entrepreneurs and the existing 60,000 small businesses in the local area. Through its work with local, regional and national agencies and authorities it has developed a reputation for helping these bodies deliver their strategic economic development objectives. Over the past few years, ngage has helped businesses grow through assisting them at every stage: from assessing current performance and setting a vision for growth, through strategic planning and finance, to leading staff through change and managing risks. Whether fostering an innovative enterprise strategy, overcoming a particular local challenge, or identifying the key to individual, company, or social transformation, ngage Solutions is a critical part of the local business community. The Challenge Ngage Solutions houses its mission-critical business applications on hardware based in a data centre in Camden, North London, as part of an outsourced managed service. However given the nature of the data it was storing and archiving, it needed an effective offsite backup facility. Its incumbent service provider offered a tape rotation service based on a popular tape vaulting service provider, but for ngage it was an expensive option which they could not manage remotely. It was also not viewed as a reliable medium to restore data. "We needed a secure, robust, remotely manageable, enterprise class back up solution that could be deployed by our remote office via an Internet connection", said Peter Davis, Customer Services Manager, ngage Solutions. Crucially any solution had to be able to back up and restore a number of mission critical business applications, as well as store vital information on ngage's customer base. "Reliability, cost effectiveness and ease of use was at the forefront of our thinking when it came to looking for a solution", added Peter Davis. "Not only did we have an immediate need for backup and restore in the event of a disaster of one form or another, it had to handle a host of applications and systems including Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, and SQL." "Any solution we selected had to give us the option of configuring backup data sets of up to 100GB and archiving non-changeable documentation. It also had to identify mp3 and other non-business data to eliminate them from the backup, reducing the time window required to a minimum", he continued. The Solution The solution ngage identified was a hosted backup and restore service from Interxion – Secure Data Service or SDS – that could be deployed to its remote offices via an Internet connection. Interxion Secure Data Service provides customers with a complete backup and restore service based on industry-leading technology, ensuring that backup and restore management is easy. Using a simple user interface, ngage can now perform configurations, scheduling and restores, ensuring that it has complete control over its data, regardless of where the equipment is based. Traditional backup solutions require capital expenditure and internal staff to maintain and operate them. Considered complicated, especially when data has to be recovered quickly and easily, traditional media can also degrade over time resulting in a total loss of data. In addition, using other types of media can result in long delays before data is restored not least if it is stored off-site on tape. Interxion's Secure Data Service is designed to create successful backups and ensures that the backup is instantly off site. The SDS service can backup standard file systems such as Microsoft, Novell, Unix, AS400 and Mac as well as live Oracle, SQL, Exchange, Notes and other Hot backup databases. It can even restore individual mailboxes or emails. Based on fault tolerant, disk-based, secure storage subsystems, coupled with highly reliable SDS software, Interxion ngage Solutions only needs to take a single backup of the data it wishes to protect and from that point on, only data that has changed is transferred to the Vault, thereby saving bandwidth and time. 'Point in time' restores are possible by keeping multiple copies or versions available on the Vault. With SDS there is no need to restore the full backup followed by the incrementals. When ngage Solutions needs to recover the exact data it needs, the software automatically reconstructs and restores in one easy step, from the date and time asked for. The Benefits Based at its secure London data centre and replicated to a secondary data centre over 300 miles away, SDS from Interxion delivered the range of functionality that ngage Solutions was looking for. Peter Davis continued: "With continuous software and back-end infrastructure upgrades, we are secure in the knowledge that we have the most up-to-date solution available. Interxion's agentless technology offers a high-performance, cost effective, scalable solution with excellent service for organisations such as us dealing with large volumes of business-critical data." "It only requires the installation of a single piece of software on the back-up server, and there are no additional hardware back-ups, software or connection fees. This minimises the Capex involved. We can rest assured that our data is safely housed in two enterprise-class data centres and available whenever they need it", he added. "Interxion's SDS is an excellent service for organisations dealing with large volumes of business critical data", said Greg McCulloch, Managing Director of Interxion UK. "It only requires the installation of a single piece of software on the back-up server, and there are no additional hardware, back-up, software or connection costs. This minimises the Capex involved. We now have approximately 500 unique users of this service, all of whom can rest assured that their data is safely housed in an enterprise-class data centre and available whenever they need it." write your comments about the article :: © 2009 Computing News :: home page |