Back at the end of July I took a look at why traditional backup software approaches are faltering at managed service providers (MSPs) and new solutions such as those from R1Soft are having such success with these providers. Since then I have had an opportunity to speak with GSI Hosting, an MSP in Kansas City, MO, who explained why it opted for R1Soft’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) instead of a more traditional backup solution.
GSI Hosting is a leading managed services provider that specializes in the design and management of complex, customized hosting environments engineering and overseeing secure, highly available system environments for clients of a wide range of sizes and types.
To protect the data of its clients, GSI Hosting had been using EMC RetroSpect as its primary backup software. But as GSI Hosting grew and expanded, it found that RetroSpect lacked some of the enterprise features it needed but those backup problems finally came to a head a couple of years ago.
At that time one of the servers that GSI Hosting was responsible for protecting had over 38 million small files that needed to be backed up. However neither RetroSpect nor any of a number of competing backup software products could successfully backup that server.
It was at that time that one of GSI Hosting’s administrators suggested to Mark Hotalling, GSI Hosting’s VP of Corporate Systems, that he take a look at R1Soft Continuous Data Protection (CDP) Enterprise Edition.
Deciding he had nothing to lose, Hotalling brought in R1Soft to test it and see if it could successfully backup all of the files on that server. To his surprise, R1Soft succeeded where the others had failed and GSI Hosting was finally able to successfully backup the millions of files on that server within its designated backup windows.
Now having resolved the backup crisis on that server, Hotalling took a deeper look at some of R1Soft’s other features to see if R1Soft could play a larger role within GSI.
One feature that immediately caught his eye was R1Soft’s Bare-Metal Restore. Unlike other competitive products that first require administrators to install the operating system and/or backup application before doing a recovery, R1Soft supports the restore of a block level disk image directly from the backup media so the application can restart. This reduced their restore process from as many as ten (10) steps to a four (4) step process.
Another feature that Hotalling found attractive was R1Soft’s ability to centrally manage its backup servers. Previously GSI Hosting had 16 decentralized backup servers across its data centers and it had to manually go to each one to configure and manage backup jobs on that server.
Using R1Soft, Hotalling found GSI could setup one central Control Server that would manage R1Soft’s CDP Servers at GSI’s various locations in the US and other countries.
Those features were enough to convince Hotalling to deploy R1Soft more widely throughout GSI with R1Soft now protecting over 90%, or more than 900 of GSI’s application servers. Equally important, this change in strategy also led to GSI reducing the number of man hours required to manage backups to less than 20 hours per week.
However one of the key benefits of GSI Hosting’s decision to adopt R1Soft CDP Enterprise Edition only became evident to Hotalling after R1Soft was fully deployed as he now had time to look at what else R1Soft could offer him.
What he found was that R1Soft does a very good job of exposing its APIs so third party applications can leverage them to automate the deployment and management of R1Soft’s CDP backup software. Hotalling says, “GSI has since gone through and totally automated setting up R1Soft backup jobs. GSI’s central data center management utility leverages R1Soft’s APIs so that it automatically sets up new servers for backup.”
Now when new servers need to be configured for backup, administrators can within GSI’s central management utility set it to automatically install the backup agent on the server. Further, it has been programmed to create the hosts within R1Soft as well as the backup safes and encrypt them. Once that is done, it can then take the encryption key and put it in GSI’s central management utility so GSI can track who is accessing the disk safes.
This automation had the net effect of making the 20 hours that GSI’s administrators spend on backups far more productive than the 40 hours that they used to spend. For instance, instead of manually configuring new backup jobs which was labor intensive and error prone, backups are now automatically set up consistently and accurately.
GSI also uses its central management tool to monitor R1Soft backups on its servers to make sure backups are running and completing successfully. GSI’s administrators are then sent the logs so they know which backups, if any, need attention. GSI can also then post these backup log files to customer portals so the customer can be assured backups of its application servers are taking place.
GSI Hosting’s Hotalling is probably no different than most IT managers at MSPs – they have specific backup problems that need to be solved and are open to new ideas. Further, when he discovered and started using R1Soft, he was not necessarily expecting it to solve all of his backup problems. He just needed it to solve a really tough one.
But what he and clearly many others are discovering is that next generation backup solutions such as R1Soft CDP Enterprise Edition are much more than just point solutions or even above average enterprise backup software products.
Integrating R1Soft’s APIs into GSI Hosting’s central management utility has fundamentally changed how GSI views and manages its backups as GSI no longer views backup as a chore but rather as a means to separate itself from its competition and better serve its customers.