Johannesburg, 18 Oct 2004
When Southern African Quantum Consultants & Actuaries, a majority black owned and managed, professional consultancy firm of independent employee benefit consultants and actuaries, experienced a server failure, the company could have succumbed to the loss of its data very quickly.
Experience shows that the vast majority of companies do not survive a massive loss of critical information, be it caused by a system crash, software failure, human error or hardware problems. Krish Ramiah, divisional director - administration and systems at SAQ, said the problem was caused by a hardware failure.
"We established that the hard disk on the server was not responding and as a result the server could not function," he said.
But Ramiah knew that restoring all of their data and recovering to a good state would happen very quickly. "Once the server was restored it took about three hours to restore the users and data back to normal."
SAQ`s secret? The company was running Backup Professional from Attix5, recently installed by Attix5 reseller BlackDot IT. Backup Professional is an automated server suite which backs up data to a secure offsite location on a daily basis. Once an initial full backup has been performed, the server process only backs up the daily changes, cutting down on bandwidth while still preserving the entire state of a server.
Steve Smith, technical director at BlackDot IT, says Attix5`s automatic approach to backing up critical data is an essential part of an effective backup strategy.
"Companies need to know that not only is their data being backed up automatically, but that they can recover quickly in the case of a disaster. In the case of Southern African Quantum Consultants & Actuaries, both of these principles can clearly be seen in action."
Ramiah agrees. "The biggest advantage of Backup Professional is that it is automated - which means no people problems can interfere with the backup process."
BlackDot IT is a BEE-owned ISP, Web hosting, and network support specialist with customers from home users right the way up to large corporates. Attix5 is the market leader in the development of remote, managed, secure and user friendly backup and retrieval software - across all devices - fixed, mobile and wireless.
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