A luxury resort chain chooses ShadowProtect to meet growing data protection needs, enable fast recovery and eliminate a manual DR process.
Introduction
With three resorts across Bali, Indonesia, the luxury hotel group, Como Hotels and Resorts, is a 24-hour, non-stop business with a unique set of data protection challenges.
Upwards of 7,500 hotel guests per year are continuously checking in and utilizing resort facilities. If the IT systems are not operational, bookings can be missed, resulting in poor customer service and potential loss of revenue.
Each property has an IT manager and one support staff. With a total of six IT staff across the three resorts, resources are stretched even during quieter periods.
In a worst-case scenario, the property can close as a result of a system outage, which has a direct impact on the business’ finances.
The Business Challenges
Como Hotels and Resorts had a business imperative to modernize and improve its backup strategy, with support for faster backup and recovery and replication within its three resorts as an effective Disaster Recovery architecture.
The hotel’s technology architecture consists of 24 hosts running in VMware for a range of productivity applications. Each resort was running a conventional tape backup method, which was time-consuming and as a result, with data growth, backup windows were constantly increasing.
The manual process also caused delays in critical situations and had a direct impact on the recovery time of the property during any system downtime.
Como Hotels and Resorts’ Director of Information Technology, Armika Jaya, was facing many challenges related to data protection, including backups with Veritas.
“Even though it was being backed up locally, the storage system itself was taking a long time to work, typically more than two hours,” Jaya said.
“Also, the restore time would last for almost a day, and 60 to 70% of the backups (physical or virtual) would fail.”
The ageing architecture also limited the hotel’s ability to backup to the cloud. Other challenges included manually transporting tapes to an off-site location and recovery methods were not straightforward and time consuming. If not done properly, the business would be at risk.
The Solution
To improve the resort’s data protection posture, Jaya and his team investigated a number of options.
“We did look into Veeam and other solutions, but we chose StorageCraft as it is a much simpler solution to deploy and manage, and we can perform a restore much faster,” Jaya says.
During the evaluation process, the team looked at what the StorageCraft solution delivered that differentiated it from its competitors.
“StorageCraft was chosen due to the product simplicity, faster recovery times and more flexible recovery options,” Jaya says. “We were also impressed with the price point and support from the StorageCraft partner.
“ShadowProtect SPX can provide 15-minute incremental backups on mission-critical servers which will help to minimize data loss. And during the POC, we had it set to hourly backups.”
The implementation project was fast and the new solution was up and running in less than 24 hours, which Jaya said is ‘very impressive’.
The Benefits
Following a successful implementation, Como Hotels and Resorts began realizing the business benefits.
Immediate technical outcomes and benefits included less downtime and the ability to achieve its Recovery Point (RPO) and Recovery Time (RTO) objectives of less than 12 minutes.
“This is good for Business Continuity management and impressive compared with other solutions,” Jaya says. “StorageCraft does backups without interrupting the server’s daily operation. With Hardware Independent Restore, we can restore any physical or virtual machine which aligns with our future virtualization migration plan.”
With StorageCraft’s Recovery technology, the team is able to restore a crashed server in around five minutes using VirtualBoot, and files can be recovered in just a few seconds. VirtualBoot technology boots a backup image of a system volume into a virtual machine (VM) to quickly virtualize a system that is protected by the backup software.
Yet another business benefit is more real time Disaster Recovery (DR). The team can now utilize StorageCraft’s ImageManager iFTP replication feature to replicate a backup image to another resort, automating the offsite DR process and eliminating the manual process of sending tape cartridges to an off-site location.
Conclusion
With better, more efficient data protection, the IT team can focus on more strategic projects for the business. “We now have better availability of our systems, which is good for development and testing. It is also much easier to use compared with our previous restore process,” Jaya said.
The company now has a better platform for new development and innovation and can service its guests with confidence.
