[Customer Success] DediPower Managed Hosting

OverviewSteve Wright, DediPower Managed Hosting’s Head of Technical Operations, was accustomed to looking outside of the box to find solutions that met his company’s specific needs. Faced with the need to centralize and automate his company’s backup environment, Wright discovered that R1Soft CDP Enterprise Edition was the only backup software that offered the features he required. Since deploying R1Soft, DediPower has stabilized its backup environment while improving its ability to respond to customer requests to protect new applications and recover old ones.

DediPower Managed Hosting ProfileDediPower, backed by its philosophy of "Support with Passion", is a leading international provider of IT hosting and cloud infrastructure solutions. With data centres in the UK, North America and Asia, DediPower supports thousands of customers including Sony, Virgin, Eidos, NHS, BluHalo and Lovemoney.com with the latest technology to reduce costs, improve service levels and maximize their online potential. It is ranked among the UK's 50 fastest growing private tech companies by the Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100. DediPower is headquartered in Reading, UK.

DediPower’s base line service level agreements (SLAs) start at 99.99% uptime and include options for 100% uptime. Its data centers are fully compliant with Tier 3 data center standards, providing clients with tailor-made solutions for all of their online and eBusiness needs.

Lack of Visibility Puts DediPower’s Backup SLAs in JeopardyLooking outside of the box was nothing new for Steve Wright, DediPower Managed Hosting’s Head of Technical Operations. Having been a part of DediPower Managed Hosting since its inception in 1998, Wright had learned over the years that most software was not designed to meet the specialized needs of managed service providers (MSPs) like DediPower.

Backup software was no exception to this rule. Most enterprise backup software products lacked the centralized controls that he needed to effectively manage his backup environment as well as detect and report backup failures.

This inability to detect failed backups was particularly problematic for DediPower at the time. The company guarantees in its customer SLAs that it can provide 99.99% or greater uptime but if backups fail and go undetected, DediPower’s ability to meet those SLAs is jeopardized.

Company: DediPower Managed HostingWebsite: http://www.dedipower.com Location: Cadogan House, Rose Kiln Lane, Reading, Berkshire, RG2 0HPPhone: +44 870 252 3600Industry: Managed Hosting ServicesFounded: 1998 Challenges:Lacked centralized control of backup software

Inability to effectively detect failed backup jobs

Use of tapes was less preferred

Current backup software failed to meet special requirements

Solution:R1Soft Continuous Data Protection® – Enterprise Edition

Benefits:Internal systems use R1Soft APIs to monitor and manage backups

Exception reports identify backup jobs in need of attention

Centrally manages backups across all 5 of its global data centers

Native integrated support for most Microsoft applications

Bare-Metal Restore reduced system recovery times

“Our customers have dynamic environments and their requirements for backup can change rapidly. The fact that many of these applications are natively supported and the flexibility in the solution provided by R1Soft have been a big bonus.”

- Steve Wright, Head of Technical Operations, DediPower Managed Hosting

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R1Soft Best Fit for DediPower’s RequirementsRecognizing that he needed to fix the problem, Wright took a look at the more well known enterprise backup software providers in the market, such as Veritas NetBackup (now Symantec), Legato NetWorker (now EMC) and IBM TSM; however, none of them really suited DediPower’s or its customers’ requirements for manageability and overall ease of use. Moreover, most of the other providers were, at that time, still pretty committed to using tape. So it was as he was doing his research that Wright ran across R1Soft Continuous Data Protection® (CDP) Enterprise Edition, which had three features that distinguished it from its competitors.

Continue: R1Soft Best Fit for DediPower’s RequirementsFirst, it offered a centralized Web interface. Other backup software took a more traditional approach of installing their software on a server and then requiring administrators to access it locally on the server. But with data centers in the UK, Hong Kong and the United States, DediPower could benefit immensely from R1Soft’s Web interface, which would give Wright’s team the ability to access backup servers in any of these data centers, see if failures were occurring and then work to resolve them.

Second, R1Soft provided an API that DediP-ower could call from its internal management systems. This would enable Wright to take management of backups to the next level such that DediPower’s administrators would not even need to log onto the backup servers. Instead, Wright could configure DediPower’s internal systems to call the API, automatically log onto R1Soft and then pull up all of the data related to the backup.

Third, R1Soft was designed from the ground up to use disk. This would improve backup success rates, reduce backup windows and eliminate the need for DediPower to manage hundreds of tapes.

This rich combination of features convinced Wright to move ahead with R1Soft CDP as DediPower’s backup platform of choice.

DediPower Moves Ahead with R1SoftWright made the decision to implement R1Soft over three (3) years ago and has not looked back since. One of the first things Wright did after implementing R1Soft was take advantage of its APIs and make calls to R1Soft from DediPower’s internal systems so he could centrally monitor and manage his backups.

DediPower’s internal systems were configured so that they could log onto R1Soft and immediately pull back all data related to the status of backups. Once this information was gathered, DediPower could run exception reporting to confirm that servers were config-ured for backup and if they had any issues during the backups, ultimately using these reports to demonstrate to customers that backups of their application servers were completing successfully and within the designated backup windows.

Wright says, “Even if a system goes through a change, our internal systems quickly capture, highlight and report on information from R1Soft letting us know that we need to perform certain actions. This is one of the keys to proving to our customers that our backup infrastructure is maintained and reliable.”

Almost any backup software can solve a hosting provider’s backup problems, but today’s forward-looking companies want more. They need solutions that automate and centralize backup management while expediting recoveries. Using R1Soft CDP Enterprise Edition, DediPower Managed Hosting was able to make automated backups and near real-time recoveries a reality for its customers.

[Customer Success] DediPower Managed Hosting

Application Support and Bare-Metal Restore Unexpected BonusesAs he used R1Soft, Wright also discovered that it included support for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and MySQL backups. This has given him the flexibility required to adapt to the rapidly changing needs of his customer base without necessitating the purchase of new licenses in order to provide that additional level of support for his clients.

Wright says, “Our customers have dynamic environments and their requirements for backup can change rapidly. Having to add a new module every time they introduce a new application would not have worked effectively for us. The fact that all of these applications are natively supported by R1Soft has been a big bonus.”

DediPower’s support teams have also earned kudos from its customers because of R1Soft’s Bare-Metal Restore feature.

At times, a customer’s server fails or applica-tion data is corrupted and the application needs to be restored. Other times, the customer simply wants to test a production application on a test server to see how the application performs under certain conditions.

In either of these scenarios, DediPower’s support teams can now grab an available server, perform a Bare-Metal Restore and have that system online and ready for use for either production or testing in less than a couple of hours.

Backup Automation is What DediPower Wanted and Found in R1SoftDediPower Managed Hosting initially adopted R1Soft because it solved the key challenges that the company faced in its environment: centralizing and simplifying the management of its backups.

Wright says, “R1Soft’s ability to automate our backups coupled with its centralized manage-ment reporting saves us so much time by freeing up the time of our systems administra-tors so they can focus even more time on keeping our clients’ solution performing at the highest level.”

Since deploying R1Soft, DediPower has gone on to leverage other features such as CDP’s application integration and Bare-Metal Restore (BMR), which have added even more value.R1Soft’s native support of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and MySQL enable DediPower to quickly respond to a customer’s needs for data protection, should they unexpectedly change; while using BMR, DediPower can restore the machine in less than a couple of hours.

The robust combination of features found in R1Soft CDP has enabled DediPower to transform its backups. While the company initially switched to R1Soft to solve its backup problems, in doing so, DediPower discovered a new goal: creating an environment in which all of its backups were centrally managed and then automated. Using R1Soft CDP Enterprise Edition, DediPower was able to achieve that objective.

R1Soft is a division of BBS Technologies, Inc | 2010 © Copyright BBS Technologies, Inc.

www.r1soft.com

About R1Soft:R1Soft is the developer of Continuous Data Protection® (CDP) software, scalable and high-performance backup software for Windows, Linux, and virtual environments. Recognized as the leading commercial backup software in hosted services and the Cloud, R1Soft CDP currently protects more than 200,000 servers worldwide.

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