Gerald Eve - first case study
Leading firm of chartered surveyors and property consultants turn to Logicalis’ ‘brilliant’ backup and disaster recovery solution
Company Profile
Gerald Eve is a national firm of chartered surveyors and property consultants with a network of 12 offices and more than 300 employees. This includes 40 associates and 84 partners – one of the highest client-partner ratios in the sector.
They provide corporate asset management, consultancy and transaction services to public and private sector organisations. Their services includes occupational and investment agency, planning and development, every aspect of building surveying, rent review and lease renewal instructions, compulsory purchase and compensation, valuation and rating.
Customer's Business Issues
The loss of company data would be fatal to Gerald Eve's business. Gerald Eve wanted to make sure that the firm and its customers (many in the FTSE100) knew that their data was secure and in any eventuality they could rely on a proven and rugged back-up and restore system.
The firm faces strict regulatory requirements, which require financial electronic records to be stored for seven years. As well as needing to consolidate backup and storage on a single system, Gerald Eve also wanted to put in place a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity strategy.
Although it has specialists in IT and other business support disciplines, Gerald Eve wanted as many of its management team as possible to concentrate on delivering excellent services to its clients – to free up their time to focus on the business rather than operational tasks.
Gerald Eve consists of a regional network of twelve sites and wanted to minimise the security risks and inconvenience attached to holding backup data locally at each site. “We were relying on people in our various offices who didn't always understand why they were doing backups and what it all meant,” recalls Warren Stephen, IT Technical Director, Gerald Eve. “It was often the case that our backup regime was inconsistent and although centralized from an administrative console, remote backups were not always reliable. It was also extremely time-consuming and an inefficient use of resources.”
The company needed to speed up data processing and restoration. One mission-critical operational area was the accounts system, which holds vital information about customers as well as dealing with standard procedures such as invoicing. No longer can companies wait days for data to be restored.
The Logicalis Solution
InfoXafe® is the first complete and effective disk-based back-up, restore and replication service – a service that is secure, accessible, fast and efficient with a performance which allows companies to dispense with tape.
“This solution has enabled me to design, implement, manage and report on a stable and comprehensive disaster recovery strategy which will benefit the firm for years to come – it's a brilliant product.” - Warren Stephen, IT Technical Director, Gerald Eve.
Why Logicalis?
Secure - 100% online restores
All data stored in an InfoXafe system can be accessed online to enable instant real-time restores, without relying on the manual loading of tapes by administrators. The automated scheduling of back-ups and movement of data off-site reduces the risk and ensures compliance of a firm wide disaster recovery and business continuity policy.
Accessible - Back-up for remote locations now feasible
Data held in Gerald Eve's remote offices account for over 30% of the firm's critical data. InfoXafe's usage of patented commonality factoring technology, that enables a 95%reduction in network traffic during backups, allowed Gerald Eve to centralise the protection of remote office data without costly investments in additional network bandwidth.
Fast - enormous reduction in back-up window
Back-up windows were starting to become a problem. A successful back-up of data, which took over 4 hours to complete, now takes 2 minutes and 33 seconds.
Efficient – Lower administrative effort
Restoring files is often the Achilles' heel in backup and restore solutions (finding and obtaining the tape from store and then searching for the data) – InfoXafe has helped Warren at Gerald Eve with this; “One of our remote offices deleted a key folder (as users do) – it was not big, only about 200 small files but it was key data and we restored it whilst they were still on the phone – brilliant”.
Replication to remote sites
No back-up solution is complete without a full off-site repository for your vital data. In the case of InfoXafe, Logicalis backs-up Gerald Eve's data at
a remote location. Such data is accessible online for restore over the network back to either Gerald Eve's primary or its disaster recovery site.
Quote Callout for PDF version:
“InfoXafe takes us to a new level in back-up and restore”
Warren Stephen, IT Technical Director, Gerald Eve.
