Digitiliti

Timing is everything. Certainly, a logistics company lives by that credo. For Koch Logistics of St. Paul, Minn., a division of family-owned, privately held Koch Companies,’ Digitiliti came along just in time. The company’s data storage requirements were growing each year and tape libraries no longer offered enough space, nor did they provide a big enough window. “I was at a point where I faced buying new libraries, and changing to new versions that supported archival and data retention,” says Bruce Waslie, senior systems engineer for Koch Logistics. “And that doesn’t include our concerns about disaster recovery. “That’s when Digitiliti came along,” he says. An agentless backup and recovery solution, Digitiliti offers secure, online, remote technology. That technology provides Koch Logistics with a mix of benefits that no tape library – or any in-house storage solution – could provide.

The financial benefit of using Digitiliti, rather than purchasing new libraries and upgrading software, is huge. “It’s expensive to keep up with software changes,” Waslie says. “It’s expensive to keep up tape libraries.” With Digitiliti, the company doesn’t pay for an agent or for ongoing maintenance or support. Koch pays only for the storage space their data takes up on the system. And Digitiliti’s unique compression technology ensures that space is minimized. Each day, Koch protects more than 2000GB of data from two locations with Digitiliti through a bonded T1 line over the internet. The system compresses that data to less then 900GB (about 2.4:1).

Confidence in the system also is a big plus. “We’d always been concerned about our backups – simply, whether or not they worked,” says Waslie. With Digitiliti, he knows that the backups are being done, they’re being done within Koch’s window, and that they’re being done securely.

“We started with just a few servers; now we have 11 servers backing up to Digitiliti,” he explains. “It backs up my most critical data, the high-end servers I couldn’t do business without. I have no worries – I know it’s done.” Waslie is sure that business could go on with little interruption if a fire, tornado or other disaster destroyed Koch’s facilities. “This building could blow up and I could find HP boxes, install Digitiliti’s client and be functioning again quickly.”

File-level restore is as easy as system-level. “With Digitiliti, it’s easy to get a single file back,” says Steven Bishop, Vice President of Sales for Digitiliti. “We hold everything in random form, and our software manipulates files, building the single file back when you need it.” Waslie knows that to be fact. “One sales rep inadvertently deleted something, and I restored it. It was quick and easy – in minutes. There were no tapes to spin, I just keyed in the information. It was like doing a local restore on a hard drive. “I was happy. And,” he adds, “I had one very happy sales rep.