MSP NetCare reaps benefits from move to new backup vendor

Sydney managed service provider Netcare says it has slashed the time it takes monitoring and maintaining backups after moving to StorageCraft.

The company, which has more than 100 customers, moved to StorageCraft after it acquired a competitor who utilised StorageCraft's backup and recovery technology.

Darryl McAllister, NetCare managing director, says while the company had planned to transfer the new business to the vendor NetCare had been using, it instead found StorageCraft's ShadowProtect 'was a more suitable backup and recovery platform for all clients'.

"We reversed our decision and began the process over a two year period to standardise on ShadowProtect," McAllister says.

NetCare's client base is a mix of Sydney-based businesses with a focus on the wholesale and distribution industry. Most clients, whose users number from 10 to 100, run on-premise Windows Server based ERP applications, including SAP Business One, MYOB Exo and Jiwa. Many servers are virtualised, running either VMware or Hyper-V.

The MSP has now standardised on the deployment of ShadowProtect as a core component of its three IT service plans and is utilisiing virtual licensing and leveraging ShadowProtect for physical to virtaul server projects.

McAllister says the company is looking to test virtual boot with ESX and Hyper-V.

"An important value-add to NetCare clients with SCADA systems is the installation and monitoring of ShadowProtect to ensure that downtime of very expensive machinery is minimised if a computer fails," the company says.

"NetCare is now providing increased fault-tolerance for many manufacturing clients, supporting both Linux and Windows SCADA systems.

McAllister says "While StorageCraft recovery times tend to be faster overall, the biggest point of difference for us, compared to other solutions, is reliability.

"Broken, unverified, backup chains are now a thing of the past.

The previously manual process of performing validation checks on backups – which required a full-time network operations centre engineer just for backups – has been streamlined, thanks to the accuracy and reliability of verification and reporting, Netcare says.

It says it now spend on average two hours a day monitoring and maintaining backups, including application upgrades.