Secure Data Solution^® Saves Customer Time & Money while Keeping Data Safe
 

  An IT department can be stretched to its limits with an incompatible IT infrastructure. One of the biggest challenges for Furniture Brands International was creating a unified backup policy for its many systems. A solution was needed that would back up both its System z and Power platforms in a single stroke. Because these multiple platforms used different backup mechanisms, the company struggled to ensure it could bring its systems up again quickly in the event of an emergency. They saw disaster recovery as crucial to the business’s long-term goals, both to protect the company should a disaster occur and to save money on its IT operations. "We wanted one standard single disaster-recovery strategy for both the mainframe and Power environments". said Lacey Griffith, Furniture Brands’ director of IT enterprise applications. Following a successful 30-day trial, Furniture Brands was confident it had found the tool for the job. “After we went through the trial period, everyone was so impressed that it was clear we were headed in the right direction. In fact, I would’ve been afraid to take the SecureAgent^® solution away from our operations people, they loved it so much. It could’ve been dangerous,” Griffith jokingly says. Acting as a virtual tape library, the Secure Data Solution^® (SDS) controls backups by pushing data from one system to the other over a secure TCP/IP connection. That data is then backed up to disk rather than to tape. In the event of a disaster, operations can be brought up on the backup system much more quickly than the previous seven-day window. The SDS has saved the IT Department money by reducing the need for tape, tape vaulting, and eliminating the need for a 3rd shift. Restore requests which once took 44 hours are now coming in at around 15 minutes.

   Read the Entire Furniture Brands Case Study from IBM Systems Magazine