Business Challenges:

For small to mid-size businesses, system downtime is never a minor detail. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a day can be lost, severely impacting businesses, sometimes to the point of collapse. Luckily, such an extreme scenario has never been the case with the U.S. TyloHelo Group offices. But the company was savvy enough to know that, with its current disaster recovery solution, any kind of disaster or other event that caused equipment failure or loss would result in downtime that could last up to five days, translating to a hefty financial toll. “We were using a Quantum tape backup solution,” said Matt Campbell, IT director at TyloHelo. “But you never know if even a tape will suffice, especially if it’s missing when you need it most.”

Campbell is referring to an incident in 2004, when all of TyloHelo’s servers were stolen, along with all its tape drives. “Luckily, I had one
tape and one domain controller at another office,” recalled Campbell. “From that, we were able to restore our complete domain. We lost three days, but none of our data.” Still, three days lost was three days too long, in Campbell’s opinion.

Campbell’s memory of the theft resurfaced when, in February 2009, he noted that their current servers were moving past end-of-life, and, although he wanted to keep the servers that still performed well, the others were ready for retirement. “Since we were going to replace
some servers, we thought it was a good time to find a disaster recovery solution that would provide immediate backup in case of disaster or equipment loss,” said Campbell.