Barracuda Backup Service Displaces Tape at Immigration Support Services

I think peace of mind and confidence are the greatest benefits, and the price is minimal for that advantage.”
– Jeff Boatright, Executive Vice President, Immigration Support Services

Tape Backup Slow & Inconvenient

“Our business generates a lot of data, so it’s vital that we have good, accurate, timely backups at all times,” said Jeff Boatright, Executive Vice President and Co-Owner of Immigration Support Services. “We had a tape backup system and a series of daily, weekly and monthly backup tapes. We would take them offsite and rotate them. And as we grew and the amount of data grew, it became increasingly cumbersome to have to do that. It was slow and inconvenient. Even the occasional need to recover a file wasn’t the easiest thing to do.”

Immigration Support Services, based in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, is a private company that processes visa petitions on behalf of employers around the nation that would like to hire someone from overseas. “We help them prepare the paperwork and submit it to the government, not unlike an accountant might prepare a tax return for a company and submit it to the IRS. It’s an HR outsource service,” said Boatright.

Day-to-day management of the tape backup system became a burden for Immigration Support Services. Since the company did not have its own IT department, one of the employees had to assume the role of part-time backup administrator. Continually swapping out tapes and transporting them offsite was time-consuming and a hassle. The company wanted a better way to back up its database and file systems – a system that was easy to manage, backed up data consistently and provided fast recovery.

From Tape to Barracuda Backup Service

In February 2006, the company decided to replace its tape backup system with the Barracuda Backup Service (known at the time as Bitleap) from Barracuda Networks. This service provides full local backup to disk and replicates data to two geographically remote sites for disaster recovery. At the customer’s site a small backup server sits on the network. The server initiates backups automatically based on a user-defined schedule and de-duplicates data inline to reduce storage requirements by as much as 20 to 50 times. During off-hours it encrypts and transmits data to the remote sites.

Pricing is based on total storage consumed. “Barracuda Networks has brackets of subscription rates that are based on total storage needs, and then it’s billed monthly,” said Boatright. “They send warnings when you bump against the ceiling of your plan. But they’re very helpful in reviewing your backup settings to make sure you’re not backing up and retaining more data than necessary.”

Transitioning from tape to the Barracuda Backup Service was a straightforward process. “It was like going from horse and buggy to automobile. It’s not too hard. When you instantly get to go 60 miles an hour, the little bit of effort it takes to learn to drive the car is nothing compared to the benefit of having learned,” he said.

Peace of Mind and Confidence

After their struggles with tape backup, Boatright feels relieved to have a reliable third-party service take care of backup and recovery. “Having the backup effectively done for us, having an Internet interface, being able to read the backups and retrieve files as necessary – the whole convenience of it was night and day,” he said.

“We’re not a technology company, we’re technology users. The company is relatively small. At our largest we have been only about 20 employees, but we generate a lot of work and data. Being able to unload backup on a purchased service was tremendous. Not only was it convenient, but it instilled confidence in our ability to have good backups. That just means it is something you don’t have to think about during the day.”

“Occasionally someone will delete a file by mistake. We haven’t had a catastrophic failure, thankfully. But someone might come in and say, ‘Oops, I can’t find this file – I deleted it.’ We can retrieve it in a couple of minutes and put it back on the server where it’s supposed to be. It really is very simple.”

Boatright considers the fee for the Barracuda Backup Service to be less than the cost of labor for managing the old tape backup system. He continued, “We can run the company and have confidence our information is stored well and retrievable. I think peace of mind and confidence are the greatest benefits, and the price is minimal for that advantage.”

 

 Copyright © 2009 Apropos LLC. All rights reserved.

Purewire Relies on Brocade for Delivering a Global Web Security Service with a Cloud-Based Infrastructure

We have two main goals. One is keeping users secure, and the second is not to disrupt normal web browsing activity.”
– Dr. Paul Judge, CTO and Co-Founder, Purewire

Software as a Service – Around the Globe

What infrastructure is needed to deliver a web-based software service with consistently fast performance to users around the world? While it is one matter to deliver performance to users in a dedicated, local environment, it is another altogether to deliver performance globally over the World Wide Web. This question of performance is one Purewire had to answer as it built out a data center infrastructure for its web security service, which it launched a little over a year ago.

Purewire is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of web security services for organizations of all sizes – small businesses to Fortune 1000 enterprises. “Purewire provides a service to secure users while they are surfing the web,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief technology officer and co-founder of Purewire. “We accelerate traffic, so they are getting legitimate content faster. We also are looking at the destination to make sure they are going to the appropriate places, especially in the case of businesses. And then the third thing we do is examine the responses from those websites to make sure they are not malicious and trying to attack the user’s PC or compromise that user’s computer.”

Purewire acts like a security guard sitting between a user and the web at large. “A user simply points outbound web surfing through the Purewire service. And regardless of the location or destination they are visiting, their web activity is going through this infrastructure,” he said.

The Purewire service appeals to enterprises because it offers comprehensive web security for their workers. Enterprises can enforce a user policy for web activities like browsing, web applications and social networks. It protects users inside and outside of a company’s firewall. Judge continued, “The Purewire service not only protects users when they are at the office, but also when the user picks up that laptop and goes across the street to the coffee shop or across the country to a hotel. Purewire is always in between that user and the web, so we have the same level protection regardless of location.” It applies to laptop PCs as well as mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry, which have previously gone unprotected. A cloud-based service also avoids having to install web security appliances at every remote or branch office. Thus, it is easier to deploy and centrally manage.

The challenge for Purewire was to deliver these security benefits without causing a perceivable slowdown in a user’s web experience, regardless of their location. “We have two main goals. One is keeping users secure, and the second is not to disrupt normal web browsing activity,” he said.

Brocade ServerIron for Global Server Load Balancing

Purewire set up server farms hosting its web security service in several data centers around the world. Then it needed a means to direct users to the best data center for the fastest response time, and within a data center, to route requests to the most available server. They chose Brocade ServerIron 350, ServerIron 450 and ServerIron 4G series of application delivery controllers to provide this global server load balancing and traffic routing capability. These application switches offered high performance and application throughput as well as ease of management in a globally distributed environment.

Dr. Judge elaborated, “No matter where a user is in the world, we need to reliably get their data routed to our data center and through our data center. So we use Brocade for load balancing and traffic redirection. Whenever a user is, say, in the middle of South America and decides they need to connect to a Purewire service, the load balancing will direct them to the appropriate data center. Then within that data center, we again use intelligent load balancing to direct that traffic to the best possible server.”

A user doesn’t know we’re there, unless and until we have to protect them from some threat.”
– Dr. Paul Judge

Performance as Designed

When asked if this cloud-based infrastructure is meeting expectations, Judge responded, “Yes, absolutely. Customers are delighted. Our channel partners are delighted. People are becoming more aware of the need to protect their users and more aware of the advantages of deploying that as a service. The number of customers that we service and the amount of traffic that we monitor is steadily increasing… The Purewire service is performing as designed – a user doesn’t know we’re there, unless and until we have to protect them from some threat.”

 Copyright © 2009 Apropos LLC. All rights reserved.