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Newsletter

November 14, 2007

Cogan

General Information

Cogan Wire and Metal Products designs and builds custom mezzanines, security guardrails, wire mesh partitions, and condominium lockers. Founded in 1901, the company is based in Terrebonne, Quebec, Canada, and has 100 employees. Its products are sold by 6,000 dealers to customers throughout the United States and Canada. Cogan has manufactured custom products for hundreds of companies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, The Walt Disney Company, Costco Wholesale, and Mercedes-Benz.

Situation

In addition to the IT infrastructure typical to a company of this size, Cogan invested in a technologically advanced environment to host and deliver new custom web based services to its customers; thus making significant performance improvements for departments such as estimation, sales and quality control.

To protect these assets and as a general good business practice, Cogan’s IT department implemented a backup system based on HP hardware and Symantec’s NetBackup software suite. This solution offers automatic backups of critical data, and will allow a partial restore of Cogan’s important systems (accounting, emails, engineering documents etc.) in case of a disaster, but it will not backup the entire software package including operating systems, applications, configurations and system states. So when a restore is needed, a significant amount of manual work is needed to bring the systems back to a ready state; the backed up data can then be injected into the newly re-created environments. This proves to be very time consuming and non-efficient for Cogan’s IT team.

With IT-focused services becoming an important part of the business process, Cogan needs a solution to complete the existing backup system by providing faster restore time and minimizing the downtime that occurs after a disaster.

Why Acronis

Acronis offers a software solution that integrates well with existing backup systems. Its added value lies in its ability to create complete images of servers on a regular basis with a minimal footprint, thanks to the full/incremental backups.

The most important feature that separates Acronis from the competition is the ability to restore a server image to completely different hardware, or on a virtual server. This gives Cogan’s IT team much needed flexibility to prepare disaster recovery plans three to five years in advance even though the same hardware might be difficult or impossible to find at a later date. If anything happens four years from now, and the physical server is completely out of service, Cogan’s IT department can buy a new server and restore the Acronis image to the new hardware. Or to minimize downtime even further, Cogan’s IT department can restore that image on a virtual server regardless of what hardware was initially used.

Acronis also offers a centralized Management Console to schedule and manage backup and restore operations for Cogan’s fleet of servers. For IT professionals Acronis’ Management Console is a valuable asset for organizing and managing server backup policies and schedules. The console provides a collection of tools and features that allow for disaster recovery optimization including custom command execution before and after backups, SNMP logging and granular file and folder restore via the image mounting feature.

Online backups of mission critical servers ensure that the servers are properly backed up without interruption and are prepared for any disaster scenario. Overall, the Acronis solution gives more depth to the disaster recovery procedures implemented by Cogan’s IT department and places all essential servers on a schedule of uninterrupted backups while allowing full or partial restores as needed.