Digitiliti

For any IT director, a good night’s sleep is hard to come by. For an IT director at a law firm with 1/2TB of data – a firm that only sends tapes out once a week to a disaster recovery site – any sleep certainly is filled with nightmares.

At Moss & Barnett in Minneapolis, Director of Information Technology Cheryl Thompson says that sleep is the main benefit of moving the firm’s data from tape onto Digitiliti, an online enterprise backup system. “Disaster recovery was our number one issue,” explains Thompson. “We were backing up to several devices, and generated several tapes a night.” But, the firm only sent tapes out once a week. “We risked losing a week’s worth of data,” says Thompson. “Now we only risk a day, or less. The benefit to me personally is getting a good night's sleep! The benefit for the firm is protection of data.”

Ease of use is another huge benefit of Digitiliti to Moss & Barnett. Steven Bishop, Vice President of Sales for Digitiliti, sees that backing up to Digitiliti saves time and effort for the firm, and for Moss & Barnett Network Administrator Bruce Garber personally. “Bruce is their only IT administrator, so it takes a lot off his hands. It’s automatic. All the backups are set, and they just run.” “The software is straightforward,” agrees Garber. So is restoring data. Comparing the restore process with Digitiliti to restoring data from tape, Garber says, “The restore process with Digitiliti is quick and simple. It’s quite a bit faster than tape. We’re organized here, so we could find a tape easily. But the process of restoring from tape takes 10 to15 minutes, and you can’t do anything else on the system while it’s restoring.

“It’s important to have that data available whenever we need it. With Digitiliti, it takes a couple of minutes. I don’t restore too many times a week – maybe three or four – but it adds up. I’m saving an hour a week.” “The firm went with Digitiliti because of the wide-open architecture,” believes Bishop. “We allow them to hold whatever data they need, for as long as they want. Other services may only let you hold a deleted e-mail, for example, for 10 days, because there’s a limit to their space. With Digitiliti, there’s no limit.” The reason Digitiliti can offer so much space (and speed) to customers in its vault-protected data center is twofold: Digitiliti’s custom data reduction technology compresses data up to 1/20 of its original size. And while many backup and storage systems run full-system backup – often saving the same file over and over – Digitiliti recognizes redundant files and backs up only new and changed blocks of data. That combination also delivers security (because the blocks of data are highly compressed and encrypted) and savings (because Digitiliti customers only pay for the space they use in Digitiliti’s vault-protected Fortress Storage Center).

While Digitiliti allows companies to rest easy about their data, it doesn’t fluff pillows, dispense warm milk, or play lullabies. Yet.