Acupay: 2 Continents of Data, 1 Easy Backup & Recovery Solution

Acupay, with offices in New York, London, and Madrid, has invented revolutionary new systems to allow issuers, custodians, brokers, and investors to overcome the many hurdles to reducing excess foreign taxes on cross-border securities holdings. Additionally, Acupay utilizes a central, web-based system for end investors to secure their tax relief electronically, greatly reducing the time and effort required to obtain their paperwork. Managing all of this data is Thorpe Thompson, Acupay’s Director of Technology. His small staff manages information spread across two continents, making the task of ensuring adequate backups and disaster protection plans are in place a must.

The Challenge:

With so much financial information to manage, it was imperative that Acupay employ a reliable backup solution to handle their SQL databases and file data that needed to be protected.

Acupay’s previous backup solution involved two data center locations, one in New York and the other in London. The strategy included nightly incremental tape backups and weekly full system backups. The tapes, which were stored in an offsite tape facility, were expensive to store, and overseeing backups at the London office was difficult at best. Thompson’s constant challenge was to ensure that everything ran smoothly.

“We work with a small IT staff,” worried Thompson, “and if people were out sick or on vacation the backups weren’t always getting done in a timely manner. The weekly tape rotation could be missed.”

The Solution:

Zetta came to Acupay’s rescue in January 2011. Because ZettaMirror requires no ongoing maintenance, all Thompson had to do was select the correct directories and a desired backup schedule and let the system run itself. “It is set-it-and-forget-it,” claimed Thompson. “The installation was painless. My Zetta salesperson walked me through the first ZettaMirror install and then I did the rest myself. All of our offsite backup is with Zetta now.”

Acupay is currently running ZettaMirror in four to five Windows servers in the New York office and one Windows server in the London office. They are mirroring SQL databases and end user files, including documents and spreadsheets, to the Zetta datacenter in New Jersey. They are currently protecting nearly two terabytes of information, a number that will undoubtedly continue to grow as their business and databases expand.

The Results:

Thompson no longer worries about missed backups or wrong tapes. “We are really happy with it. For about the same money we were paying for tape media and our offsite tape service, we implemented Zetta and got better reliability, I spend less time and attention on backup, it takes less time for data restores, and we added the London office to the process.”

“We have had to do a couple of restores. Before, I would have had to travel to the offsite storage facility to fetch the correct tape, bring it back to the office and then go through a tape restore. With Zetta, I had the file back in less than fifteen minutes and I never left my desk.”

For more information, visit the Zetta backup & recovery resource center.