SwimWays
SwimWays shores up design data with StoreVault
Customer Overview
SwimWays Corporation is a privately owned worldwide manufacturer of leisure and recreational water products, headquartered in Virginia Beach, VA. By constantly performing market research and product development, the company is able to manufacture and market industry-leading products for children and adults. The company markets four unique brands - SwimWays, PlayWays, Kelsyus and Holiday Arts. The SwimWays brands include many products, such as Spring Float, the Toypedo® line of toys and games, Rainbow Reef, Swim Sweaters and the Safe-T-Seal swim teaching system
As a result of over 35 years of innovation, SwimWays has been able to place these products in most major retail outlets and with most independent pool retailers. SwimWays employs 80 regular and 40 seasonal employees, and, like many small and medium sized businesses, has grown organically over time.
Customer Challenges
Several groups within the company were making forceful storage demands on the IT staff, and all groups had different requirements. In order to meet these needs, SwimWays had 12 servers and 2TB of production data under management. The SwimWays creative services team was designing art and packaging on Apple Macintosh computers, requiring about 1TB for high-resolution image files. The sales team was creating large customized Microsoft PowerPoint proposals and presentations for each client, often with duplicate content. The 1TB of Macintosh data from the art department was concentrated on a dedicated Snap Server (which had been known to lock up for periods of over 4 hours). A conglomeration of external Firewire drives, backup server space, other small NAS devices, and even spare capacity on the Exchange server were pressed into service for the rest of SwimWays’ file-serving demands.
A Symantec Backup Exec server handled backups of all of this data to three external Firewire disk drives, and backup copies were deleted to make room for new backups. One external Lacie hard drive was taken off site for disaster recovery while the remaining two were used for onsite data. The portable drives were extremely unreliable: they failed both during daily usage and during regular backups.
SwimWays required both design and sales data to be retained for the entire three-year product life cycle, but there was no tape subsystem for backups. In short, SwimWays was barely keeping its head above water.
Customer Solution
Having reliable, fail-safe storage for backups was of utmost importance. A potential solution would have to encompass the Macintosh systems, as well as the Windows systems, preferably handling 2TB in less than 24 hours. It had to hold 2 weeks worth of data, for short-term recoveries, and ideally would be able to integrate into the existing Symantec Backup Exec environment, possibly functioning with a tape autoloader. Above all, it had to be reliable but still cost-effective.
SwimWays administrative personnel looked at a low-end NetApp device, but found it could not fit the budget. They also considered servers with 500GB drives working with an external storage array to handle the data.
Jeff Brechtelsbauer, newly-hired Director of IT at SwimWays, knew that the dam was about to burst. Then Jeff De Los Reyes at Dataline, a Norfolk, VA, reseller, suggested the StoreVault S500. The S500 incorporated NetApp technology, but fit into Jeff’s budget. In addition to completely replacing the current mixture of direct-attached storage devices, it could handle disk-based backup, store multiple copies of the data, and work with the existing environment.
Jeff installed a StoreVault with 12 drives, the CIFS protocol, RAID-DP™ and a SCSI card. The immediate result of the installation was that all data could be backed up to StoreVault via Symantec Backup Exec in half the time it used to take and with room to spare.
But that’s not all. Jeff intends to move the Macintosh production data off of the Snap Server and onto to the StoreVault, using either the native MacOS SMB client or by adding the NFS protocol to the StoreVault. Then he will attach a tape autoloader to the SCSI card on the StoreVault and have Backup Exec migrate data to tape on a regular basis. Best of all, the NDMP protocol allows the Backup Exec server to control the process, while the data simply moves from the StoreVault to tape.
Customer Experience
Jeff says: “The StoreVault has completely stabilized our immediate need for a disk-to-disk backup environment. We went from an unstable environment, in which we had limited confidence that the backups worked, to a stable environment, in which backups are no longer an issue. Now we can leverage this device to take the next step and use NDMP to get data directly to tapes for the offsite archive.”
He adds, “We can recover data in the case of a disaster, we have reduced our backup window and we have become more confident in daily operations. A year ago one simple hardware problem or user error would have resulted in lost data. Dataline employees were very helpful in their recommendations, especially in advising SwimWays on future requirements and additional steps to enable tape archiving. Without that expertise, SwimWays would have missed out on NetApp technology and flexibility at this price.”
Customer Benefits
The StoreVault S500 solution has reduced SwimWay’s backup windows by nearly 100 percent, allowing SwimWays employees to have confidence in daily operations and network performance. In addition, new opportunities for file sharing and disk-to-disk-to-tape have enabled them to leverage their existing investments and move even further than they realized when they first analyzed their problem. As Jeff says, “Backups to disk are now actually happening. We’ve gone from struggling with the backup process to mastering it and are looking at future technologies like NDMP to really get a handle on disk-to-disk and disk-to-disk-to-tape archiving.”
“If a file is lost, it can be retrieved from the backup in minutes, not hours.”
For SwimWays, the StoreVault S500 has turned the data management tide.
Technical Environment
- Operating systems in use: Servers: Windows 2003, Windows 2000 Desktops: XP Professional and Mac OS X 10.4
- Critical software deployed: Made2Manage (ERP system), Microsoft Exchange
- Servers : HP servers, Snap Server 4500
- Backup Software: Symantec Backup Exec 11d
