Graphics Company Chooses Zetta Systems Data Protection Over Tape

Tad Helke, Director of Technology for Olympic Reprographics (a division of ARC, the largest reprographic company in the world) was researching a solution for his growing data storage needs. What Mr. Helke found was typical of his industry. Data growth was spiraling uncontrollably. The time to recover lost data from traditional back up was no longer acceptable to a business that was increasingly becoming 24/7.

Olympic Reprographics’ customer base, comprised mostly of architects and general contractors, is producing larger format digital copies and CAD files. It’s critical to the integrity of each job site that Olympic support a data protection plan that is scaleable and flexible. Backing up large files to tape and more importantly, restoring files from tape was no longer an option. The Director of Technology researched data protection and disaster recovery products for 12 months and decided that the features offered by a SAN best suited his company’s needs. Appliances based on Zetta Server allow Mr. Helke to provision storage on demand using SmartDisk technology to implement Thin Provisioning. SmartDisks are created on the fly and present themselves to the network as SCSI disks. Thin provisioning allows Olympic’s limited staff to create SmartDisks of any size regardless of physical disk space. When actual utilization reaches a preset value, the Director of Technology is contacted by Zetta Server via SNMP and email. He then orders future disks at lower future disk prices allowing him to control spending and budget growth according to need. Olympic also required the flexibility of using Open Systems hardware.

Mr. Helke met with the engineers at Zetta Systems during the same time that he evaluated other products in the storage, back up and data protection space. He decided upon a combination of Zetta Server software, Dell hardware, Brocade switch, QLogic fibre channel cards and his own team’s hands-on integration. The features listed below helped make Mr. Helke’s decision an easy one:
-Support for Fibre Channel, SCSI, ATA, and Serial ATA external storage
-SmartDisk technology for flexible storage provisioning
-Just-in-time provisioning of physical storage
-Unlimited, instantaneous, and lightweight snapshots with instant recovery
-Replication of SmartDisks to remote locations
-Snapclones of SmartDisks to inexpensive storage
-Windows and UNIX support

Since Zetta Appliances can be attached to large external storage, it is easy to create appliances that can be used for
- Exchange Data Protection
- SQL Server Data Protection
- Oracle Server Data Protection

Zetta Controllers can be deployed either as primary or secondary storage. As secondary storage, Zetta Controllers are ideal for protecting Exchange and SQL Servers using DAS Storage with minimal interruption to the current operation.

“Our previous method of backing up files was effective as far as that goes. Maintaining a scheduled back up to tape is simple. The trick was restoring files and our time to recover was increasing with each added work order. We needed the speed of disk based storage. We needed the feature sets only Zetta Server provides. We needed to stay within a strict budget,” said Helke.

Benefit 1: Olympic Reprographics selected Zetta Server based on the ability to thin provision storage. Thin provisioning provides the company with the ability to purchase storage that is truly "on demand." Zetta Server's SmartDisks can be created to volumes of ANY size regardless of the current disk capacity at the physical layer.

Benefit 2: Zetta Server's unlimited, instantaneous point in time copies of data (snapshots) that can be scheduled every minute coupled with instant restores.

Benefit 3: Zetta SmartDisks centrally manages current data storage needs on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux and MAC OS.

Benefit 5: Leveraging the cost of an open-system, Intel platform. Olympic Reprographics installed and manages a 4 TB SAN on 2 TB of physical disk space. The entire SAN architecture and instant data recovery appliance built on Dell hardware took 2 weeks from order received to production environment.

About Zetta Systems:
ZettaSystems develops intelligent storage solutions for Storage Consolidation and RealTime data protection with Instant Recovery. Zetta Systems supports industry standard hardware such as Nexsan, IBM, HP, JMR and Sun to ensure that customers are not locked into purchasing storage from a proprietary hardware vendor. Zetta Systems, based in the Seattle area, markets its products through a worldwide channel of reseller and OEM partners.

For more information, please visit: www.zettasystems.com or call +1.425.485.5548, ext 234.

About Olympic Reprographics
Headquartered in Seattle Olympic Reprographics was formed over 50 years ago to provide a means of duplicating large-scale drawings and plans for the architectural, engineering and construction industries. In 1999, Olympic Reprographics joined the American Reprographics Company. As the largest reprographic company in the world, ARC provides Olympic Reprographics with sister divisions in more than 160 remote printing locations across North America.

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