OS: Windows Small Business Server 2003
Current application: Data server; dual redundancy with two Drobos; offsite backup
Favorite Pro features: Faster backup, faster restore, dual redundancy, more space

Secure Data and Quick Recovery in the Financial Service Provider
AMDG provides wealth advisory services to philanthropic and socially-responsible minded families in the Detroit Metro area. Wayne Titus, AMDG’s president, sets a high standard for maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of the financial data that his firm manages on behalf of its clients. According to Wayne, “The data that we use is extremely critical. To make sure that that data is maintained, kept confidential, and that we don’t have it at any risk of loss is extremely important.”

In addition to being a CPA, Wayne is also a Certified Information Systems Auditor who has evaluated data centers and business processes to make sure that organizations have robust recovery procedures in place. When he founded AMDG Financial, he applied the same rigor to designing the company’s data network. “When I left Price Waterhouse Coopers to start my own practice, I designed my own system. On my Windows Small Business 2003 server, I had an external hard drive and a tape backup. But I really wanted to have some redundancy because if something failed, I didn’t feel like I had enough coverage. You don’t want to treat the highly unlikely as impossible, especially when it comes down to important client information and business critical information.” After a short search of available solutions, he bought his first Drobo.

Getting Rid of the Inefficient Tape Drive
Wayne’s first task for his Drobo was data backup at the office. But soon, he realized he could accomplish much more if he used Drobo more strategically. “What I ended up doing was purchasing a second Drobo, and setting up a virtual private network to my home. Rather than having to take things offsite, I created a process to copy the files from the office to the Drobo at home. That gave us offsite storage with dual redundancies worked in, along with our normal backup procedures. I’ve actually stopped using my tape drive because it just isn’t an efficient way to do this.”

Disk Images on DroboPro for Faster Restoration
Even though his data is safe, Wayne has still experienced the pain of disk failures. Recently, the internal disk on his application server failed. “I came in one morning and the server wasn’t running. I had to reinstall a new drive and reload the software and get back up and running fairly quickly. I was down for two days. I knew at that point I needed to have more robust backup and recovery procedures.  Now I can’t afford to have that happen and not be prepared to deal with it.”

Wayne’s solution: create disk images for his two servers and of all the company laptops using DroboPro. “If we have the image backed up, it might take maybe an hour to install that image once the hardware components are available. The Drobo, when it first came out, had some size and speed constraints.  If I’m going to do laptop images and server images, I’m going to need additional space.  DroboPro is much faster.  The iSCSI speed is lightning fast.  So I’m really looking forward to having that.”

Wayne plans to utilize the full capacity, speed and redundancy of his DroboPro. “I’m really excited about this new DroboPro.  It takes out a lot of the risk.  You’ll be able to use it with dual redundancy and so that means if two hard drives fail, which would normally be a catastrophic type event, you can still recover the data.  It also provides you an opportunity to put in eight drives, which is a lot of storage capacity.  And it gives you the opportunity to backup at a much faster speed, which is extremely important for a business like ours that uses a client-server architecture.  We use the application server, for a number of different things, so any kind of slow down is really inconvenient.”

Once he creates his server images on DroboPro, Wayne is looking forward to being protected against more serious problems.  “Let’s say, for example, there’s a catastrophic issue at my office.  With those images stored offsite, I can take those images and transfer them to a data service who basically will rebuild and install those on a server for me.  Then I can be back up and running within a couple hours’ time instead of days or weeks in order to gather all the hardware myself.”

A “Perfect Solution”
Wayne recommends Drobo for any small business. “I’m probably a little bit more technologically savvy than a lot of small business owners, but I think that this is not a piece of technology that people have to be scared of. For the small businessperson who wants to make sure that they have data redundancy and files maintained in a position where they’re not going to lose them, I think this is a perfect solution for them.”

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