Customer Story - Carey Color |
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Carey Color Inc. is one of the most versatile prepress shops in the United States. Established in 1979, Carey Color specializes in prepress and digital imaging services for catalogs, packaging, print advertising, metal printing, and point of sale. They provide high end color correction, press fingerprinting, retouching, page assembly, digital photography, digital asset management, workflow integration, offset platemaking, metal platemaking, direct digital engraving for flexographic and dry offset plates, and 2D and 3D embossing. Carey Color is a small corporation that has Enterprise level data storage needs. Carey Color has leveraged PresSTORE to replace Legato Networker as its primary backup and archiving software for vast amounts of digital data that Carey Color deals with.
We maintain Windows and Linux servers, as well as Windows, Linux, and OSX desktops. We have to back up nearly 8 TB of production data with 1TB worth of incremental data changes daily. These are hosted across 6 main Windows 2003 and Linux servers, with 60 Windows, Linux, and OSX clients. Additionally all of our data is archived indefinitely and used again in future jobs with our customers. We needed a software package that had fair licensing costs, and was versatile enough to handle our cross platform environment. In addition to our archiving needs, we needed a software that would let us manage backups, replication, and tape management intelligently. With PresSTORE, we are able to implement sane backup procedures using replication to go disk to disk to tape, and then house those tapes offsite for disaster recovery purposes. Due to the licensing costs, and the lack of cross platform support, we were never able to do that with Legato Networker.
ARCHIWARE PresSTORE is the only software package that is truly cross platform across Linux, Windows, and OSX. It is the only software package that will preserve Macintosh Resource information no matter what platform you are backing up from or restoring to. With support for reading and writing Macintosh resource information to and from Helios, Xinet, Netatalk, NTFS, and OSX file systems, PresSTORE is unparalleled in the backup and archiving software industry.
 Figure: Backup Concept Carey Color
When researching a new backup and archiving software we measured several factors, including features, cost, ease of integration, ease of use, and support. Most traditional backup software vendors do not understand the archiving needs of the printing and pre-press industries. They do not understand that our industry needs to be able to store their data offline indefinitely, and need advanced search functions to be able to retrieve the data quickly. PresSTORE provides an indexing infrastructure that provides full, quick file searching, as well as support for a "Gallery view" visual representation of the image when used with Helios ImageServer, Xinet FullPress, or QuickTime. This allows us to not have to store everything inside of an asset management system, as well as a storage management system. PresSTORE is flexible enough to fulfill both of those needs for offline archived data. This takes an extra step out of the archiving process. Additionally, because of PresSTORE SDK and CLI interfaces, it was possible to integrate PresSTORE directly with the Mediabank asset management system.
When it came to features, we found that PresSTORE was the only software that bundled Replication, Archiving, and Backup into one affordable product. No other company supported this wide of an array of features into one product offering. Certain pricing structures drew us to PresSTORE. The lack of "slot based" licensing for our library was a very large incentive. EMC/Legato, and other storage software vendors seriously taxes users for wanting to use more slots. PresSTORE on the other hand charges based on the number of tape devices that you use. Hence PresSTORE makes more sense in an archiving environment. This allowed us to purchase a tape library that really met our company's need for long term near-line functionality, rather than sinking a lot of money into a disk based system or exorbitant slot licensing. Additionally, PresSTORE makes no distinction between traditional tape drives and libraries, and "virtual" disk based tape drives and libraries. This allows us to back up to disk quickly, and then stream to tape later, or just back up to disk. Most other software vendors make you pay a premium for this service.
When it came to ease of integration, PresSTORE was #1. Using a very easy demo process, we were testing the software within an hour. We were able to take an extended demo process right into production, simply with e-mail support for PresSTORE. Most other resellers wanted to charge me large integration and install fees to offset any discounts in licensing. Some companies would not even let me demo their software without paying for an install first. The fact that it easily installed on Mac, Linux, and Windows platforms made it easy to extend it out to all facets of our company quickly.
The support aspect was one area where we initially thought ARCHIWARE would come up short. In actuality, the support we received exceeded all of our expectations. On more than one occasion they have provided round the clock support, and very fast turnarounds on needed patches. They have also been incredibly responsive in terms of feature requests, or just taking the time to explain some of the inner workings of PresSTORE and how to best integrate it into our system.Archiware’s support staff worked directly with Mediabank’s in order to integrate their two systems. This is one of the many examples of Archiware’s superior support staff. When explaining problems to their support staff, they are always extremely responsive, open to suggestion, and take the attitude that no problem is too small or large. We finally decided to go with PresSTORE because we felt no one else could match their combination of features. PresSTORE was the only product we felt was specifically geared towards the printing, prepress, and creative industries, and that offered us the exceptional cross platform capabilities we required. Additionally, the superior support we received during the testing phase convinced us that we would not get better support elsewhere. Despite the geographical distance, we were quite excited to be PresSTORE's first U.S. install and felt that their software gave us an edge over other companies within the industry. Their software allowed us as a medium sized business, to compete with larger companies who had licensed "enterprise" level software that did not have the features that PresSTORE did. Due to our long demo process, we did a large amount of testing before switching our workflow over to PresSTORE. In fact, because PresSTORE works so well across platforms, and integrates with other software using their CLI, and their ability to call external programs during the backup and archiving process, it allowed us to have a sane integration schedule, and replace certain aspects of our backup and archiving systems one piece at a time. When we started to migrate our backup and archive systems, we were on Legato Networker, and used manual windows backups. We used Legato Networker to archive all of our data, and replication scripts to replicate our data.
A parallel need we recognized when we began to use PresSTORE, was the need to migrate large portions of our live data from legacy SGI and Linux servers to Windows servers. Using PresSTORE we were able to accomplish the amazing feat of migrating data from Xinet and Helios based systems to Windows systems while automatically translating Macintosh resource information. This was no small feat, and was only possible with PresSTORE and exceptional support from ARCHIWARE. PresSTORE's sync features allowed us to migrate terabytes from Xinet and Helios file systems mounted on Linux to Windows systems, without having to do large copies over a Mac workstation. This allowed us to save thousands of dollars in labor, by reducing the downtime for migration, and allowing large portions of the migration to run unattended.
Using PresSTORE, we achieved an enterprise level backup infrastructure. Extensively testing with PresSTORE, we were able to leverage PresSTORE with Windows Distributed File System, and Windows Volume Shadow Services, to replicate data from Linux and Windows servers using PresSTORE and DFS to a central backup server, and then backup with PresSTORE. Using VSS, we can still keep Online snapshots of file systems over the last week to go back to any point in time. Then we can rotate sets of PresSTORE backup tapes off site for disaster recovery. Using this method we can do full backups as often as once a week, or as infrequently as once per month, and just run incrementals. Conceivably, we could just run incrementals forever.
Due to PresSTORE's unique indexing structure, we can set up their index to any point in time during any of our backup cycles, and restore the files as they looked at that particular point in time easily, without having to manually go back to the level 0 and all the subsequent incremental backups to restore the files. Another great feature of PresSTORE is the ability to end a Level 0 backup early, because of necessary system maintenance, or an exceeded a backup window, and knowing that the next day's Incremental will pick up everything that was skipped. PresSTORE takes care of that all behind the scenes.
When it comes to thin client backups, we can use PresSTORE to back up Linux and OSX workstations to a central backup server, and use Windows backup and Windows Data Protection Manager along with VSS to backup Windows workstations. We can then aggregate those backups and backup to tape in order to rotate thin client backups off site.
 Screenshot example: Backup Plan
As for archiving we are still in the midst of transferring our archiving system over to PresSTORE. Because of PresSTORE's customizability, and modularity, we can move our archiving system slowly, one particular product line at a time. Using their tape cloning features we can determine different data retention policies for different costumers based on tape pools. We can provide indefinite offsite storage using clone tapes for certain customers, or archive to disk, and then clone to tape for customers for which we do frequent pickups. Finally, due to the fact that we have hundreds of legacy AIT and AIT2 tapes on the wall that were archived in legacy archive systems, we are just beginning to use PresSTORE to migrate key customer legacy data into the PresSTORE system. Using PresSTORE's Auto Archive functionality, we can restore terabytes of legacy data to a dump directory, and then use PresSTORE's auto archive features to migrate their data, saving thousands of dollars in labor over migrating this data manually.
In my opinion, there is no backup/archiving/and synchronization product on the market that matches the feature set of ARCHIWARE's PresSTORE. I am proud to tell people that Carey Color was the first U.S. customer for ARCHIWARE, and given the software's obvious value , won't be the last. No other product works across platform with Macintosh support the way PresSTORE does. No backup, archive, and synchronization product gears towards the creative, printing, and pre-press industry quite the way PresSTORE does. Even though they are thousands of miles away, their support has been as good or better than any software company which we have worked with within the United States. I am more than happy to recommend their software to anyone. article writen by:
Nathan Smith Sr. Network Systems Analyst Carey Color Incorporated Sharon Center, OH USA | |
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