This Darwin is Proven

Businesses have come to terms that their data growth rates are climbing ever higher and generally deal with them by consistently bringing in more storage to house it. However what companies may fail to do is account for how they intend to protect this data and evolve their data protection schemes to manage this data growth. Since backup is generally not a strategic initiative for most companies, the question more companies should ask themselves is, "Is it wiser for us to outsource my backups than try to manage this function ourselves?"

That's the question Jeannine Gaudreau, the Manager of Network Engineering and Security at Darwin Partners, a Wakefield, MA, based IT Services firm asked over eight years ago. When she first assumed her role at Darwin Partners, she initially could backup all of Darwin Partner's data to a single tape. At that time her biggest concerns were simply remembering to take the backup tape offsite and buy new tapes when they expired. However as Darwin Partners grew, so did the amount of data she needed to manage and backup.

As she watched her company's data growth rate explode, she saw that it was outstripping her ability to manage the backups and recover the data. This situation drove her to examine not only how to better backup and recover her company's data but do so in a more cost-effective means while creating an offsite option for disaster recovery. This situation was amplified as Darwin Partners grew and added offices in San Francisco and China as these offices needed to remain operational should a disaster strike Darwin Partner's Wakefield, MA, data center.

She initially examined more traditional options of setting up a secondary data center or doing a collocation with another company but both of them came with a huge price tag. This prompted her to take a look at AmeriVault's online backup service in 1999. While maintaining full control over her backup requirements, she wouldn't have to worry about scaling issues and could quickly add servers or remote sites on demand. Data sets, retentions and frequency were all easily customizable while AmeriVault would seamlessly manage the back end storage.

Jeannine's decision to switch to online backup in 1999 definitely represented a "thinking outside of the box" mentality at that time since only now, in 2007, is online backup maturing among SMBs. But as Jeannine can attest, she now spends far less time thinking about whether or not last night's backups happened plus she now has a number of viable and affordable options to recover her company's data should a disaster strike.

As Darwin Partners discovered, companies can not afford not to examine AmeriVault's online backup service as a viable offering. In addition to the benefits of eliminating tape management and monitoring daily backups, AmeriVault gives them more options to recover their data and, with new service offerings like RestartIT-VDR and AmeriVault-DV, new possibilities for disaster recovery and data archiving that they normally could not deliver in-house.