BUSINESS
JJO Plc is one of the UK’s largest manufacturers of household furniture. It produces up to 500 kitchens, 100 bedrooms and 200 bathrooms per week from its 1.1 million square-foot factory in Bacup, Lancashire.
CHALLENGE
With payments coming in every hour and stock to manage, JJO Plc must ensure this business data is protected. With a fragmented and unreliable backup system causing issues, JJO Plc needed a single, unified solution.
SOLUTION
Arcserve UDP appliances protect 68TB of data across multiple servers in five sites. Incremental backups run throughout the day, with weekly, monthly and yearly snapshots adding an additional layer of protection.
BENEFIT
With data restores available in minutes, JJO Plc has safeguarded the productivity of its users in the event of loss or outage. The Arcserve Appliance single solution is easy to manage and cost efficient.
Based in Lancashire, JJO Plc is among the largest British manufacturers of quality kitchens bedrooms and bathrooms. Catering to the independent retail sector, it has more than 1,500 trading partners worldwide and produces up to 500 kitchens, 100 bedrooms and 200 bathrooms per week.
Its 400 employees operate from a 1.1 million square-foot base comprising of five factory units. By scheduling regular deliveries and holding a large volume of stock, it offers a one-stop shop to retailers, and aims to provide high quality products and excellent customer services.
CHALLENGE. Safeguarding user productivity
JJO Plc’s IT infrastructure underpins its business operations – from orders, sales and purchasing to returns, production and stock management, its 400 users rely on technology to deliver good customer service and streamline the manufacturing process.
“Without operational access to systems and data, our users wouldn’t be able to function,” explains Norm Almond, Senior Software Engineer at JJO Plc. “We have payments coming in every hour, and stock to manage. Any data loss would pose a serious risk to our business.”
The company had a fragmented data protection strategy comprising of numerous solutions from different vendors, but the system was so costly and complex to manage, JJO was unable to protect its estate comprehensively. It decided to look for an alternative approach. “We wanted a single, unified data protection solution, and to move away from slower tape backups,” confirms Almond.
Any data loss would pose a serious risk to our business. Norm Almond | IT Technician
BUSINESS High quality kitchens bedrooms and bathrooms.
In October 2015, JJO Plc deployed two Arcserve Unified Data Protection appliances to backup not only its servers, but also approximately 160 PCs as well. It now protects 68TB of data, comprising of both user documents and critical system data.
“With Arcserve UDP we can back up our entire estate every hour without slowing down our network,” explains Guneet Gill, IT Technician at JJO Plc. “Even though the amount of data we’re backing up is significantly higher than before, our backups are faster and more reliable.”
Automated incremental backups run throughout the day for each device, with weekly, monthly and yearly snapshots taken for an additional layer of protection. The data is replicated between the two Arcserve UDP appliances housed in different parts of the factory. “One of the great features of Arcserve is that it gives us the flexibility to tailor our backup plans for different groups of devices. We have different plans for servers, for databases, for every day users and for high end users,” adds Almond.
Since implementing the Arcserve UDP appliances, the backup window has significantly reduced. With a deduplication rate of 98 percent, many PCs can be backed up in just five minutes, compared to an hour previously. Data can also be restored faster: although the company has not had a serious incident since installing the solution, during a drill it was able to restore a PC in just 90 minutes and a server in three hours.“Files can be restored so quickly that sometimes the user doesn’t even realise we’ve finished,” recalls Almond. The user-friendly solution monitors system status and generates a notification when the IT team needs to explore an issue, freeing them up to focus on other tasks. “We have full visibility of our backups from a single dashboard,” comments Gill. “If a backup has failed, Arcserve will automatically try again, so we don’t even need to action every alert.”
With Arcserve UDP we can back up our entire estate every hour without slowing down our network.
SOLUTION Automated incremental backups
When JJO Plc needed additional support to configure the solution, it called on Arcserve’s support services to help get unsupported devices protected. “We really appreciated that the team would remotely look at the system themselves, rather than trying to problem solve with instructions over the phone,” says Almond. “The issue was resolved quickly, freeing up everyone’s time. With previous suppliers we’ve had to wait between eight and 12 hours for a response to our call.”
BENEFIT Cost-efficient data recovery
With Arcserve UDP appliances, JJO Plc has a fast and efficient disaster recovery solution, meaning data loss has minimal impact on user productivity. But this is not the only way the company is benefitting from cost avoidance savings: the appliance model allows the company to scale its IT estate without incurring additional costs per device. “We have no extra support costs, and while there’s space for backups, we can add as many devices as we want to our system,” confirms Almond.
Using Arcserve UDP appliances has enabled JJO Plc to:
- Safeguard business continuity
- Free up resources
- Make cost savings.
“Arcserve UDP is reliable and low impact,” concludes Gill. “We can focus on other tasks safe in the knowledge that disaster recovery is taken care of.” “We’re really happy with Arcserve,” Almond adds. “It’s a great product and I don’t know what we’d do without it. If our company expands, Arcserve will be our first port of call to scale up our backup solution.”
