Acupay
The installation was painless. My Zetta salesperson walked me through the first ZettaMirror install and then I did the rest myself.
August 16, 2011
Acupay
Acupay, with offices in New York, London and Madrid has invented revolutionary new systems to allow issuers, custodians, brokers and investors to overcome the many hurdles to reducing excess foreign taxes on cross-border securities holdings. Acupay's impact on the world of foreign securities has been remarkable, including opening the door to new markets where investment activity was previously unsustainable. Acupay has also developed improved methods to directly assist end investors in obtaining the documentation necessary to receive tax relief from foreign countries streamlining the process and utilizing a central, web-based system for end investors to secure their tax relief electronically. The time (and effort) required of end investors to obtain their paperwork has been significantly reduced.
Challenge
Thorpe Thompson is Acupay's Director of Technology. It is his responsibility to insure that adequate backups and disaster protection are in place for Acupay. SQL databases and file data needed to be protected.
With two data center locations, New York and London to worry about, Thompson was often challenged to keep it all running smoothly, particularly since backup at the London location was handled seperately by different staff onsite and a separate offsite storage vendor. "We work with a small IT staff," worried Thompson, "and if people were out sick or on vacation the backups weren't always getting done in a timely manner. The weekly tape rotation could be missed."
In New York, they were doing nightly incremental backups to tape with weekly full system backups. The tapes were rotated to an offsite tape storage service. "We were spending a lot of money on tape media and the offsite service," realized Thompson. And backups at the London office were difficult to oversee remotely.
As fate would have it, just as Thompson was wrestling with these challenges, he got a call from Zetta with an answer to his problems.
Backups weren't always getting done in a timely manner.
It is set-it-and-forget-it. All of our offsite backup is with Zetta now.
For about the same money we were paying for tape media and our offsite tape service, we implemented Zetta and got better reliability.
With Zetta, I had the file back in less than fifteen minutes and I never left my desk.
Acupay's Zetta Solution
Acupay bought into the Zetta Data Protect story. They are currently running ZettaMirror in four to five Windows servers in the New York office and one Windows server in the London office. They are mirroring SQL databases and end user files, such as documents and spreadsheets, to the Zetta datacenter in New Jersey. They are currently protecting nearly two terabytes of information which is growing as their business and databases expand.
ZettaMirror is a small software agent that runs in a local server and replicates and keeps synchronized a copy of critical user data into the Zetta Storage Service. The files in Zetta are stored in native format, ready for immediate access either through an Internet browser or by directly mounting the Zetta file system from a remote server. Data recovery time is essentially zero.
"The installation was painless," said Thompson. "My Zetta salesperson walked me through the first ZettaMirror install and then I did the rest myself."
ZettaMirror requires no ongoing maintenance. Once it is configured to select the correct directories and set with the desired schedule, the system runs itself. Thompson no longer worries about missed backups or wrong tapes.
"It is set-it-and-forget-it," claims Thompson. "All of our offsite backup is with Zetta now."
Result
"We are really happy with it," boasts Thompson. "For about the same money we were paying for tape media and our offsite tape service, we implemented Zetta and got better reliability, I spend less time and attention on backup, it takes less time for data restores, and we added the London office to the process."
"We have had to do a couple of restores, and it worked great," said a happy Thompson. "Some of our users accidentally deleted files. Before, I would have had to travel to the offsite storage facility to fetch the correct tape, bring it back to the office and then go through a tape restore. With Zetta, I had the file back in less than fifteen minutes and I never left my desk."
