Case Studies
Case Studies

EVault Changes the Landscape of Data Backup and Recovery Through Enhanded Technology Solution

First to Offer Remote Management across Heterogeneous Environments; Enhanced Multi-platform Services and Faster Data Backup Bring Support and Speed to All Enterprises

Peel Mutual Insurance has always prided itself in its commitment to bring quality insurance products at cost, delivered and serviced by a dedicated staff. Part of this commitment can be seen in the company's focus on technology. Beginning in 1997, a series of events occurred that helped reshape Peel Mutual's data backup and protection methodologies.

These factors intersected as motivators to drive Peel Mutual to make major changes in the way it protected its business data:

  • The introduction of the Automobile Rate Stability Act by the Ontario government rendered Peel's existing insurance system software inadequate for the task
  • Peel Mutual's business resumption committee's resolve to embark on a paperless system to maximize information retention in the event of a disaster
  • The company's decision to install RAID 5 at the server level to offer maximum fault tolerance at the front end
  • The rapidly growing volume of business had overwhelmed the capacity of the traditional DAT backup tapes

The Major Problem

The claims information proved to be the Achilles heel of its business resumption plan. Although over 90 percent of the transactional policy information was stored on tape, the investigative information was stored on paper in the claims files. The solution to this dilemma was to start imaging the claims investigative material so that this information could be held on tape as well.

Virtually all of the firm's computer processed data was saved on a DAT tape nightly, and a tape of the week's accumulated data was transported manually to an offsite location every Friday. But as the volume of the company's processing increased, physical tape capacity for backup became a major problem.

"Our nightly volume grew to exceed tape capacity," Sean Alexander, Peel Mutual's System Technician said. "On some occasions, we would find the tape was full when arriving in the morning. We would then have to mount a second tape to complete the previous night's backup during work hours. Our users would be shut out of the system until the backup was completed."

The Solution

EVault's online backup and recovery solution proved to be the last piece in Peel Mutual's disaster recovery plan. It complemented their infrastructure and did not require the company to change its way of doing business. The EVault system does automated nightly backups of the day's work transmitted in an average time of less than one and a half hours over a leased ISDN line to an offsite colocation facility. A total of 11 GB of Peel Mutual's data is backed up nightly to EVault's offsite colocation facility. The retention scheme Peel Mutual requires results in 12 versions of data that can be restored at any time. The "effective" amount of data stored at Recall is 132 GB.

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