Fanscape uses the Miglia HS-R’s to
upgrade
its network storage and backup solution
| Kevin Glikmann,
Chief Technology Officer, Fanscape, comments: “Because our backup solution
is now disk based we save hours and hours of time during restores
and backups. Plus, because of the I/O speed of disk, we can now
backup throughout the day which we could not do with our tape
solution.” |
Overview
Fanscape is
a premier grassroots marketing company. Formed in 1998, Fanscape
specialises in the marketing of musicians
and their art, as well as, movies, video games, brands,
sports, and other lifestyle areas. The Grassroots Marketing
services includes online and offline street team direction,
online and offline media awareness, targeted email marketing,
market research, and cross promotions with marketing
partners. Currently, the Fanscape team of two dozen is
located in one two story office near Universal Studios
in southern California. It currently has over 1 million
subscribers to its newsletter. |
The Fanscape Team |
The
issue
Fanscape,
an organisation of around 20 employees, used to manage
its daily backups with backup software and tape drives.
Glickmann
comments: “I was tired of tape back-ups and wanted something
that would provide me with the speed of a disk data transfer
and redundancy.” As is experienced by most IT managers,
tape backups are a great medium for large amounts of cheap
backup, however there are a couple of downsides. |
Kevin Glikmann |
Firstly,
tape backup’s can be problematic if backups are being
run while the network is active, and can often grind to
a halt. This is usually due the backup software trying
to backup a file that is being used by one of the network
users. Secondly, recovering data from a tape backup requires
a variable amount of time, as the data file that has to
be retrieved will come from a certain place in the tape,
and it will have to be retrieved by backup software. |
Fanscape
was also being faced with the issue of future storage
scalability. As the organisation continues to grow,
so does the storage space required. A solution needed
to be in place that could provide scalable storage
for the future of the organisation.
Therefore, Fanscape was looking for a new backup and storage solution
that would help them streamline their backup process and also offer
them scalability as the organisation grows in the future.
|
The
solution
From early on it was decided that the Miglia MediaBank
HS-Rs were the only choice for Fanscape. Glickmann
continued: “There
was no other choice. The Miglia MediaBank
HS-Rs were bought as they
had the greatest price/performance ratio compared to any other
secure storage solution we looked at. It’s peace of mind
at an affordable price” What this means, is that the
Fanscape servers are now automatically copied to hot swappable
drives,
meaning that a copy of the Fanscape data can be taken in
complete form, offsite at any time. |
The
Miglia MediaBank
HS-Rs now enable Fanscape to run daily backups
throughout the day,
Glickmann explains: “Throughout the day, our backup
software backups up the changed files on our local file servers
and
database to the HS-R units. The second drives are periodically
swapped out and taken off site as part of our disaster recover
plan.”
As the backup solution is now
disk based, it saves hours and hours of time during restores
and backups. Backups
are now simple as files can be located on the mirrored
HS-R backup drive’s as they look exactly the same as the
active file disks on the network. |
|
| So
in conclusion, Fanscape was looking for a storage and backup
solution that provided them with ease-of-use, simplicity, reliability
and scalability. The Miglia HS-R is the perfect choice. Once
set up, it automatically mirrors all data on the servers. The
simplicity of the backup provided here, is that providing everyone
uses the mirrored network servers for their data storage, and
an HS-R disk is taken off-site each night, Fanscape can be confident
that their valuable data is will be completely secure. Added
to these features, the HS-R is also completely scalable as it
uses standard IDE connections, and standard hard drives that
can be upgraded in size at any time. |
The
Future
“ Right now, we use 300GB drives which leave us with plenty of space to
grow. If we need more capacity then we could either buy another HS-R or upgrade
to larger ATA 6 drives.” Concluded Glikmann |
Essentials
MediaBank
HS-R is available
in FireWire 400 or 800 configurations from our channel partners
or, if there is no reseller in your area from our
online store. HS-R is available configured with two or three
drives or as a 0 GB. All versions ship with a third tray
allowing easy offline backups
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