Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

ECKER ENTERPRISES DEPLOYS StoneFly BACKUP ADVANTAGE

StoneFly Networks Inc announced that Rosemont, Ill.-based Ecker Enterprises Inc, one of the largest specialty subcontractors in the United States, has deployed StoneFly Backup Advantage (SBA) for enterprise-class data protection and advanced storage management. Ecker is leveraging the integrated IP SAN-based disk-to-disk (D2D) solution to increase the speed and reliability of critical data backup and recovery.

Ecker Enterprises has built a stellar reputation for streamlining the planning and management of large-scale commercial and residential construction projects. Rapid data growth strained storage resources, impacting the company's ability to perform regular backups and ensure data integrity. Ecker's IT team set out to find a reliable, scalable and affordable solution providing storage consolidation with improved backup and reliable data recovery. They were pleased to find that StoneFly Networks offered a turnkey approach that integrated storage consolidation with complete backup and recovery.

SBA combines the strengths of StoneFly's high-performance Storage Concentrator i3000 with award-winning backup and recovery software from CommVault Systems. The comprehensive system, which offers plug-in backup and recovery capabilities tailored for IP SANs, was ideal for alleviating the operational burdens on Ecker's resource-constrained IT department. According to Bill Polymenakos, director of technology at Ecker Enterprises, SBA has simplified routine backup and recovery processes substantially, reducing full disk-to-disk backups to less than an hour and system restores to less than a minute.

"With SBA, we have achieved our goal of increasing the speed and resiliency of our backups while also taking advantage of moving to a centralized, affordable SAN environment," said Polymenakos.

Introduced in March, SBA is designed to support the growing business continuity needs of departments of large corporations as well as small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). To date, StoneFly's field-proven IP SANs are installed at more than 175 customer sites nationwide, providing a centralized storage network for handling a variety of requirements, including storage consolidation, provisioning, replication as well as backup and recovery.

According to Bob Boggan, vice president of sales and marketing at StoneFly, Ecker's choice of SBA validates the growing need for cost-effective "LAN-Free" D2D backup solutions. "More and more companies want to offload backup and restore operations from a local area network onto a dedicated Ethernet IP SAN," says Boggan. "Our turnkey approach enables them to simplify and speed the process considerably, while protecting vital corporate data with disaster recovery, compliance and advanced storage network management capabilities."

To boost business continuity planning at Ecker, the IT team plans to implement StoneFly Replicator mirroring software, which comes bundled with SBA, to increase performance and near-term data availability by replicating backups to a remote IP SAN. Furthermore, SBA provides a solid storage structure that can support Ecker's business growth and further adoption of automated tools and applications to enhance overall productivity and resource utilization.