Back-up - Case Study: Alpha Pro Tech
Alpha Pro Tech develops and manufactures a line of high-value protective apparel, infection control and extended care products as well as a line of construction weatherization building products for the housing market. The company has four manufacturing plants throughout the US.
The Project
Alpha Pro Tech’s requirement was to install a fully flexible solution for backup and DR between Toronto and Salt Lake City, resulting in bandwidth, cost and time savings.
Key Challenges
- To implement a fast Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) solution for the corporate network
- To achieve optimum price/performance and Return on Investment
- To apply a risk free, flexible deployment solution for the organization’s network
Operational Challenges
As an organization that recognizes the importance of backing up business critical data, Alpha Pro Tech required an easy-to-deploy DR solution to fit with both their budget and IT requirements. Prior to installing Replify Accelerator, the organization’s DR run took in excess of 3 hours.
The Solution
Alpha Pro Tech installed the Replify Accelerator Suite for their backup and DR requirements.
The Replify Accelerator Suite is an all software solution for Application Acceleration and WAN Optimization. Deployment of the software was achieved in minutes with immediate performance improvements, no disruption to the corporate network and no physical network reconfiguration required. By investing in an all software approach, the organization can enjoy massively improved employee productivity.
From a price: performance perspective, Replify Accelerator outperforms products currently available on the market for backup and DR. Replify’s virtualized software approach gives the industry’s best price: performance and ROI, a key factor in today’s economic climate. The market is in fact seeing a huge shift towards virtualization of DR solutions. The need for expensive hardware and associated costs are eliminated. A virtualized software approach means simple management, installation in minutes, and software based High Availability (HA) using existing infrastructure. Furthermore, Replify’s pricing is fixed by license blocks according to the number of concurrent users in the system, rather than actual number of users.
According to Robert Dennis at Alpha Pro Tech :
We were blown away by the performance of the Replify Accelerator suite and its ability to bring our DR run down from 3+ hours to 126 seconds. Replify Accelerator was the only solution that was a perfect fit for both our budget and features requirements, no other option even came close. The software approach to backup and DR offers a highly flexible solution which can very simply evolve with us, as our requirements change.
The Result
Alpha Pro Tech noticed an immediate improvement in their backup and DR run with the Reptor’s Cross -Protocol Data Reduction XDR technology. XDR technology is a bi-directional network caching software module which allows both ends of the WAN to ‘learn’ the data payload as it flows between the client and the accelerated servers. Subsequent sends and receives of identical or updated data between the clients and servers will be sent only as block references, with the cached content being retrieved before presentation to the client or server application. With XDR technology enabled, the performance of the product proved so exceptional that Alpha Pro Tech saw a massive reduction in the file transfer time.
What’s more, as corporate circumstances change, there are no restrictions on the number of clients or virtual appliances in a network configuration and no extra costs are incurred for setting up new virtual appliances.
