CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Catalogic’s integrated data protection solution brings simple, efficient, reliable backup and recovery to COMS’ managed services clients

COMS Offers its Customers 100 Percent Recovery with Catalogic®

INDUSTRY • Managed communications and business internet services provider

CHALLENGE • Enable evolution from simple hot-site disaster recovery to complete, granular data protection

• Improve internal productivity • Offer rmore aggressive SLA performance

SOLUTION • Catalogic DPX and NetApp for zero-impact backup

• Data deduplication, instant restore, data replication and support for disk, tape and physical and virtual servers

• Enables COMS to restore multi-terabyte files in minutes

• RPOs down to the hour, RTOs of less than an hour

BUSINESS BENEFITS • Cut IT support time from 40 hrs/week to 5 • Greater speed and reliability for restores - 99+ percent

• COMS can now offer a more complete data protection service - something that clients increasingly demand and value

For more than 20 years COMS, formerly CloudXL and System Online Limited part of the Network Resource Group, has delivered a broad suite of managed communication and business-class Cloud services targeting small and medium-sized businesses with anywhere from 50-1,500 users. From complete managed hosting to remote access to network management and monitoring, COMS provides the innovative IT foundation that hundreds of organizations rely on. In recent years, the firm has enjoyed a particularly strong presence among Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) such as housing associations, trusts and cooperatives — the government-funded, not-for-profit organizations that provide affordable housing in the U.K.

The government funding for these organizations carry a range of regulatory requirements, including strict provisions for data protection. Although some larger RSLs have sophisticated IT teams, many are smaller organizations that need specialized services from providers like COMS.

According to Gavin Harper, the firm’s previous offerings in this regard presented some limitations. “Previously, we were able to offer disaster recovery services through our ‘HIVE’ (Hosted Intelligent Virtual Environment) offering,” he said. “But this was purely disaster recovery for customers using VMware environments — an ‘all-or-nothing’ service where we provided an immediately usable remote hot-site in the event of a catastrophe such as a flood or earthquake. Unfortunately, this was an administratively intensive proposition and the value we were able to offer was narrowly tailored. We were experiencing unacceptably high failure rates that required a lot of staff time to correct.”

We recently had to restore 2TB of customer data and we were able to do it in less than two minutes - something that previously would have taken more than eight hours to complete. Catalogic gives us extraordinary peace of mind when it comes to our SLAs. We can show very persuasively that we can deliver on the SLAs we’re claiming and proposing.

— Gavin Harper Head of Networks, COMS

Catalogic is a registered trademark of Catalogic Software Inc. NSB, DPX, and ECX are trademarks of Catalogic Software Inc. All other company and product names used herein may be the trademarks of their respective companies.

DPX-CS-001-0214US

CATALOGIC SOFTWARE CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Alliance Partner

Immediate favorable impressionRecognizing an opportunity to reach a wider customer base and improve the level of service it provides, COMS began evaluating new alternatives. Its partnership with NetApp® as its preferred provider of storage led the company to analyze Catalogic’s solution. This innovative solution combines Catalogic DPX™ software with NetApp’s high performance disk storage to deliver zero-impact backup, data deduplication, instant restores, data replication, and support for disk, tape, and physical and virtual servers. The solution is flexible enough to work in mixed primary storage environments while consolidating backup processing to a single user interface.

“When we were first approached, I’d never heard of Catalogic,” Harper said candidly. “With just a 30-minute demo, I was sold — it’s a superb solution. So, we arranged a demo for all of our management and at the end of that meeting, we’d firmly decided to move forward with the Catalogic solution — but we first needed to use it risk-free for 30 days and achieve 100-percent success in our backups.”

After their successful test, COMS moved into production mode and rolled out its next generation HIVE solution to several customers. Nearly a dozen customers use the service, streaming in as much as 6 TB of data each day. “Now, with Catalogic and NetApp, we can offer a granular system for true data protection,” said Harper. “If a customer’s hard drive fails, we can restore it. If their server fails, we can restore it — instantly.”

Fast recoveries minimize any impactCurrently, COMS offers recovery-point objectives (RPOs) of as little as one hour. What’s more, the recovery time objective (RTO) guarantee is one hour — regardless of the RPO. The solution takes full advantage of the NetApp SnapVault® and SnapMirror® replication technologies for faster data protection. “Whether we’re restoring a single drive or a complete site recovery, we can produce it within an hour,” Harper said. “It’s a superb service to demonstrate to our clients. It’s immediately available and we can restore data with just five mouse clicks. Customers see it and are truly wowed by what we can deliver. We recently had to restore 2 TB of customer data and we were able to do it in less than two minutes — something that previously would have taken more than eight hours to complete. Catalogic gives us extraordinary peace of mind when it comes to our SLAs. We can show very persuasively that we can deliver on the SLAs we’re claiming and proposing.”

Within COMS world-class data center, Catalogic has delivered an 85 percent gain in labor efficiency just by slashing the time needed to monitor its managed services. What once required a full-time, 40-hours per week support engineer can now be handled in just five hours. As a result, COMS can allocate its valuable resource to support other critical areas of the business and enhance customer service.

Furthermore, COMS has used the Catalogic solution to guarantee its clients a 99+ percent backup success rate compared with just 80 percent it was able to offer previously. This is helping to accelerate the company’s growth by enabling COMS to target a wider market

of customers while controlling storage utilization and reducing costs by leveraging NetApp storage efficiencies.

“We’re now offering a unified disaster-recovery/data-protection solution in one place. And the IT folks we speak with are very happy to finally stop worrying about and devoting so much time to the backup/recovery challenge,” said Harper. “With Catalogic, we are meeting all of our service level agreements with clients. We anticipate that the added value that NetApp and Catalogic provide will play an important role in helping us to potentially double or triple our managed services business over the next few years.”

We anticipate that the added value that NetApp and Catalogic provide will play an important role in helping us potentially double or triple our managed services business over the next few years.

— Gavin Harper, Head of Networks, COMS

© Copyright Catalogic Software 201450 Tice Boulevard, Suite 110Woodcliff Lake, NJ 07677201.930.8200U.S.A.catalogicsoftware.com

United Kingdom: +44 (0) 129 380 4734France: +33 (0) 1 46 67 46 10Germany: +49 (0) 2102 95460Singapore: +65 (0) 9777 1859Netherlands: + 31 (0) 20 347 23 88