Success Story – Zen Innovations (Global Trade Tracker)
Amanda Enterprise backs up rapidly changing mission-critical data to a tape autoloader
Think you have a lot of data to manage? Try tracking all goods that cross the border in and out of the world’s principal trading countries. Not just some products — every product that moves from one country to another. This includes items such as gas, natural gas, oil, precious metals, food, live stock, frozen goods, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and others.
Zen Innovations is the home of the Global Trade Tracker, a powerful web-based tool that is used to access original trade statistics from the world's principal trading countries. Global Trade Tracker provides customers with a clear and objective picture of the trade flows for more than 55 countries around the world. The tracker provides critical information on the value and quantity of goods (e.g. oil, precious metals, food, live stock, frozen goods, pharmaceuticals, chemicals) being imported and exported around the world
Now, aggregating and managing this vast amount of information is all in a day’s work. The amount of data acquired and managed by Zen grows steadily as the company gathers monthly trade information. The company provides monthly trade figures, typically between 1-3 months after the month closes, to its customers and provides information on the value being imported or exported as well as the quantity of the goods.
Initially, to manage all of the data, Zen used scripts and manual backup procedures. The company was aware that this was a temporary backup solution until it could find the right backup software solution at the right price.
After evaluating Amanda Enterprise from Zmanda, Sergio Laberer, Managing Director of Zen Innovations said, “Zmanda offered the best product for the price range we had in mind. Using its ability to manage multiple platforms over a web based GUI was exactly what we were looking for.”
“Our initial manual processes, scripts and cron jobs quickly started to get complicated as we grew our infrastructure. We needed to do backups regularly and be in a position to recover quickly without too much manual intervention. Our initial approach was neither scalable nor suitable to work efficiently.” Laberer added that it was important for the chosen backup and recovery solution to easily protect critical and fast-changing data and to be a lower cost solution without compromising functionality.
Zen purchased Amanda Enterprise and installed it on a backup server running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10. The company used backup clients for SLES 10, Solaris 10, Mac OS X, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Pro. Data was backed up to a Sun StorageTek SL 24 Tape Autoloader. About 650 GB of data is backed up per night.
Other Zen Innovations servers also hold web-based custom applications that are hosted for customers as well as internal servers such as mail and file servers — all business critical data. It is absolutely crucial that Zen systems engineers have the ability to recover data quickly as most of these systems need to be operational 24x7 with minimal downtime.
“The administration via Zmanda Management Console, which handled all the set up and interaction with our tape stacker, helped to make our entire backup process very simple and it cut down on a lot of work for our systems engineer,” said Laberer. “AE’s ability to support multiple platforms and its web based administration, which allowed us to easily manage all our backup and recovery processes.
“After installing AE we have peace of mind knowing that all systems are backed up and that all corporate data is safe.”