Eagle Bulk Shipping Inc.
All of the other alternatives we looked at were more expensive than and not as reliable as Zetta Data Protect and ZettaMirror.
July 28, 2011
Eagle Bulk Shipping Inc.
Eagle Bulk Shipping Inc. is the largest U.S. based owner of Handymax dry bulk vessels that range in size from 50,000 to 60,000 deadweight tons. Headquartered in New York City, they operate a modern fleet of vessels engaged primarily in the transportation of a broad range of major and minor bulk cargoes, including iron ore, coal, grain, cement and fertilizer along worldwide shipping routes. Eagle Bulk's fleet is comprised principally of Supramax class vessels, a larger and more efficient Handymax design that enjoys strong demand from customers around the world.
Challenge
Steve Drimones, IT Support Professional at Eagle Bulk Shipping, realized that they were not ready for an IT disaster. They did not have a good way of protecting and restoring critical business data including spreadsheets, Word and PDF documents and even mail files. Their current form of offsite data protection involved copying critical files to a local hard drive and then removing the hard drive and storing it offsite in a bank vault. The drive had to be continuously shuttled back and forth to update the backup. Data recovery meant fetching the drive and then reattaching it. In short, Eagle did not have a way to quickly return access to their data in the case of local data loss or disaster. This didn't leave Steve feeling good.
Alternatives
So Eagle Bulk Shipping investigated alternative solutions to improve their recoverability. They looked at several cloud-based storage service offerings as well as expanding local storage to include SAN-based replication. Among the cloud offerings was Zetta Data Protect. "All of the other alternatives we looked at were more expensive than and not as reliable as Zetta Data Protect and ZettaMirror," stated Drimones.
Zetta only took us five minutes to install, well maybe ten.
Zetta is simple to use and very reliable. Zetta gives us more peace of mind.
Eagle Bulk Shipping's Zetta Solution
Eagle Bulk Shipping chose Zetta Data Protect with ZettaMirror. Their primary production configuration has storage from three Windows servers being synchronized nightly to the Zetta Storage Service in Secaucus, NJ where it is securely stored in encrypted format.
The data is automatically replicated and synchronized using the easy-to-install, lightweight ZettaMirror agent, one copy running in each Windows server. Unlike some backup solutions, with Zetta Data Protect, there is never a licensing fee for the ZettaMirror agent, so running multiple copies and protecting multiple servers is very cost effective.
ZettaMirror intelligently deduplicates file changes, only transferring those parts of a file that have actually changed since the last sync point, minimizing the sync window. And the data transfers are encrypted for security and done in parallel to further optimize the transfer.
Once the data is at Zetta, it is available in a directly mountable file system for instant access or recovery, including historic versions of the files.
"Zetta only took us five minutes to install, well maybe ten," claimed Drimones. Within three to four days, all the initial data was replicated to Zetta and was fully protected.
Result
Although Eagle Bulk Shipping has not had to respond to a major disaster yet, they have already had cases where files have been accidentally deleted locally. With Zetta Data Protect, the files were quickly and easily recovered via the Zetta web interface and restored to the local servers, a capability that was not possible in their old environment.
"Zetta is simple to use and very reliable," concluded Drimones. "Zetta gives us more peace of mind."
