- Even the Insurance Guys Need Insurance
By Caitlin Gordon, Senior Product Marketing Manager, EMC Backup Recovery Systems
Backup is often referred to as a company’s insurance policy – something you spend money on in case you need it. Just like you invest in health insurance to protect your family, you invest in backup to protect your data. Well, the world of IT is to backup as the commonwealth of Massachusetts is to health insurance – everyone’s got to have it. This includes the insurance companies themselves, who often protect our valuable health records along with other business critical data.
This brings us to March of this year when I screamed from the mountaintop – ‘Attention IBM i Users: You Deserve Better Backup!’. I’m happy to report this message was received loud and clear by many customers including Mid-Continent Group. Mid-Continent Group, a subsidiary of the Great American Insurance Group, struggled with the same backup challenges that so many others have before. They were using an old, slow and expensive tape based system to backup their IBM i environment and it simply couldn’t keep up. The “insurance policy” for this insurance company was falling short.
Mid-Continent replaced hundreds of tapes with a local and remote Data Domain system and didn’t have to change their processes as the systems easily integrated with IBM BRMS backup software. After implementing Data Domain, Mid-Continent:
- Reduced DR time from 5 days to 4 hours
- Removed human intervention in backup process
- Eliminated tape and associated costs
- Avoided additional power costs
With Data Domain systems, Mid-Continent is now able to focus less energy on backup and more energy on meeting its customers’ insurance needs. In the words of Brock Lyons, System Admin Manager, Mid-Continent Group, “The Data Domain solution has been one of the most cost effective enhancements we have implemented in my time at Mid-Continent.”
For more on Mid-Continent’s story, read the EMC Press Release and IT Jungle Article.
