Sidebar: AmCOMP Brings Backups In-house

Computerworld - Gary Bishop, director of enterprise architecture at insurance company AmCOMP Inc. in North Palm Beach, Fla., used to monitor the changeout of 12 tape cartridges a day as part of a backup strategy at 10 remote sites. Each site had two to six application servers. "You can imagine that became a management nightmare," he says.
Cost was another issue. At $100 a cartridge, the direct-attached infrastructure was costing $1,200 a day on media alone.
When AmCOMP rolled out MetaFrame serverware from Citrix Systems Inc., backups became easier, since all applications and data resided back in the North Palm Beach data center.
But replicating more than 1TB per day of insurance policy documents and related data to its Orlando data center ate up the entire 24-hour backup window. "By the time we finished one backup, we had to start another," Bishop says.
"IBM's business recovery services was costing us $100,000 a year, and it was inadequate." Restoring data involved calling and waiting for the backup tape to arrive on-site.
"To get what we really wanted for disaster recovery with Sungard or IBM, it would have cost us $1 million a year," he says.
Instead, AmCOMP spent just under $200,000 to build its own disaster recovery data center. It set up a storage-area network in Orlando and began replicating data to its disaster recovery site with NSI Software Inc.'s DoubleTake software.
Bishop says NSI's software works seamlessly and is simple to administer. "If I go into a user directory and create a file, usually it will appear in Orlando in one or two seconds," he says.
At both the primary and secondary data centers, AmCOMP uses Computer Associates International Inc.'s BrightStor software to back up from its disk array to a large tape library.
DoubleTake replicates user-selected files or entire volumes from one or more source servers to one or more target servers over standard network connections.
Bishop says he expects a one-year return on investment from his new infrastructure.
"And now I can switch users over to access data sets remotely and then fail back to our original location or primary site at our leisure," he says.