ProActive gains simple backups and rapid restores with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Dansk

ProActive is a Danish IT consulting company, with headquarters in Copenhagen and a branch office in Aarhus. The company employs more than 80 people, and specialises in solutions based on Microsoft software.

“One of our major offerings is based on Microsoft SharePoint, and we also use SharePoint internally for collaboration and document management,” explains Henrik Christensen, System Administrator at ProActive. “Although the SharePoint software is excellent, it does not include any backup or recovery capabilities, which was a pain point for us and, potentially, for our customers as well.”

SharePoint data is organised on three levels – sites, sub-sites and individual items, such as documents. However, most standard backup solutions are unable to manage the data on these levels, and are forced to simply take a copy of the entire SQL database. As a result, restoring a specific site or item can be a long and difficult process – the whole database must be restored, and the right tables identified and copied.

“If someone deleted a file by accident, it could take us up to half a day to restore it,” explains Henrik Christensen. “Our IT team is always busy with high-priority work to support our internal users and customers, so spending a whole morning on restoring a file was a real waste of our time. We decided to find out if there was a better way of handling SharePoint backups, so we consulted IT-WIT.”

Working with the experts
IT-WIT, an IBM Business Partner based in Lyngby, Denmark, specialises in server, storage and backup solutions based on IBM hardware and software. The company particularly prides itself on its expertise in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), with five consultants who have achieved IBM certification.

“IT-WIT’s expertise in Tivoli software is exceptional,” says Henrik Christensen. “If you ask them a technical question, they immediately give you the right answer. So when they suggested introducing Tivoli Storage Manager for Microsoft SharePoint, we were totally confident – even though we knew it would be the first time the solution has been deployed in Denmark.”

Simple, rapid restores
The new solution provides a TSM agent designed specifically for SharePoint, which makes it easy for ProActive to find and restore data – whether it is an individual file or an entire site.

“We now have a simple interface that helps us locate the data that needs to be restored, and there is no need to search through the tables manually,” Henrik Christensen says. “With TSM for SharePoint, a task that used to take half a day has now been reduced to a point-and-click. We were amazed how easy it was – we didn’t even need any special training.”

The new solution extends ProActive’s use of TSM, which already encompassed the company’s Microsoft Exchange environment and several other systems.

Unlike many traditional backup solutions, TSM backs up data incrementally – only copying data that has been added or edited since the previous backup. This means that a lower volume of data needs to be backed up each night – which increases the speed of the process, cuts network traffic, and should increase storage efficiency.

A highly recommended solution
“We have been so impressed with IT-WIT and with TSM for Microsoft SharePoint that we are recommending all of our customers to adopt the same solution,” says Henrik Christensen. “By making it easier to keep data safe, TSM will make our SharePoint solutions even more attractive to customers, so we are planning to make the software a standard part of our offering in the future.”

He concludes: “TSM provides a single central point of control for backing up our major systems – substantially simplifying our IT administration workload. Backups and restores of SharePoint used to be a big headache for us, so IBM deserves credit for identifying the issue and creating such a simple and effective solution.”