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Case Study: Manufacturing

Storage and back-up solution built on an HP and Symantec platform

One of the world’s biggest global clothing manufacturers needed a centralised storage solution with faster back-ups and stronger disaster recovery. Freestyle IT provided a solution that combines speed and simplicity, saving hours of valuable time for the company’s busy ICT team.

The client and their challenges

Our client is one of the largest clothing manufacturers in the world. Their UK manufacturing site is based in Nottinghamshire, with the global HQ located in the Far East. Their seven-strong ICT team work in a fast-paced environment with constant pressure from the business to maintain their existing systems – and to provide support for approximately 200 users.

The main issues faced by the company were a lack of centralised storage and an extremely slow and manuallyoperated back-up solution.

The company used local disk storage on separate servers. But this had led to common data sets being split across different servers. This increased the administration workload and triggered potential issues for the company’s file-sharing strategy.

In addition, the company had no robust disaster recovery solution in place.

Its back-up solution used multiple tape drives across multiple servers. Some jobs took 20 hours to complete and required the manual changing of tape cartridges.

The Freestyle IT solution

Freestyle IT provided the company with an HP NAS Server with sufficient storage headroom to last more than five years, based on current growth projections. Freestyle’s technical consultants also consolidated the separated data sets and provided de-duplication functionality to further optimise the solution.

Freestyle worked with the company’s ICT Team on a suitable data migration plan to allow them to easily move business and user data onto the new systems. In addition, using the in-built File Resource Manager, the Freestyle team were able to implement a much-improved folder and volume level quota system. This enables the company to have policies and safeguards in place to ensure the best and most efficient on-going management of its data.

To provide the robust disaster recovery solution, Freestyle installed a second HP NAS Server on one of the remote sites and used Double Take replication software to replicate all data to this second device, synchronised in real time.

The final piece of the jigsaw was to replace the multiple tape drives with a single HP Autoloader running the latest version of Symantec’s Backup Exec software. This solution uses the latest SAS technology and delivers massive gains in performance and automation for the whole process.

With its technical consultants leading the project from start to finish, Freestyle designed, tested and installed the solution in cooperation with the company’s ICT team. The same Freestyle consultants also remain part of the team that now provides fully-managed support for the whole solution, ensuring continuity and high quality of service.

Discover more

Contact Freestyle IT today on 01256 760922 or by email at
sales@freestyle-it.co.uk

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