Leading
graphic design company AGI, relies on
Miglia MediaBank HS-R's to protect its business data
| Damon Segal, marketing advertising
and design consultant, AGI commented: “AGI is an extremely busy graphic
design company and backup is often the last thing on our minds
at the end of a long day. Now we have the HS-R’s as a backup
solution we simply put a drive in a secure location each night – and
a complete backup is done! Since I have had the HSR's I have been
able to sleep a lot easier each night!” |
Overview
AGI is a graphic design company
that has been established for over fifteen years. It provides
a ‘One Stop Service’ for its clients. By handling
all aspects of a job it allows them to get on with what they
do best! In addition to the creative, design and consultancy
aspect of the operation, AGI provides many ancillary services,
thereby justifying its title 'The One Stop Studio'. |
Due
to the combined purchasing strength of many of its clients it
is able to remain extremely competitive in all areas, whilst
ensuring a hassle free, high quality, delivered job, integrating
all stages of development.
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AGI
has worked on a variety of projects across a wide spectrum of
industry sectors from retail companies such as, Tesco, Clinton’s,
Safeway’s, Woolworth’s, Argos etc., to companies
in the corporate sector such as Lumenis, Aculight, Honda, and
Sony.
As a ‘One Stop Studio’ AGI is able to develop a concept through to
final delivery. It can produce corporate branding, stationery and brochures,
provide companies with a web presence whether basic or a complete integrated
e-business solution. Visit www.agi.co.uk for
more information. |
The
issue
AGI
is an extremely busy graphic design agency. It is not yet
of a size that it can employ an IT person to manage the
IT systems, including backup, so it is currently up to
the last person in the office to start the backup each
night.
AGI
had used and looked at a number of possible backup
solutions. Up until it started using the Miglia MediaBank
HS-R’s it was using LaCie 250GB drives, but these
were not mirrored so the data had to be physically
copied at the end of each day, which had to be remembered
to be done and took approximately 30 minutes each day!
Damon
added: “Before the LaCie drives we used a
variety of backup software applications such as
the backup solution offered by Apple and also Retrospect
from Dantz, which is good but does tend to lose
itself every now and then in our experience. As
well as being able to backup effectively each night
we were also after a disaster recovery solution,
i.e. what happened if our building burnt down in
the night? We would have our data but it would
take us time to be able to use it in earnest.”
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The
solution
After some careful
evaluation of what was available on the market, AGI chose Miglia’s
MediaBank HS-R. The HS-R answered all the criteria they were
looking for in backup and disaster recovery solution:
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Backup – The
HS-R features Raid 1 support on a hardware level, therefore
the two disks operating in the unit are mirrored From the user’s
perspective, the computer they work with ‘sees’ only
a single hard drive. At the end of each day, one hard drive
can be removed from the HS-R and taken away or placed in a
secure location. A backup is completed by simply removing the
drive using the specially designed quick release tray - could
it be any simpler?
Disaster
recovery – The problem with more traditional backups
is that in order to recover the backed up data, you have
to have a similar system setup somewhere else, i.e. the Retrospect
software, and the tape drive that corresponds with the backup
tape you have. With the Miglia HS-R backup, all you need
is
a machine with an IDE connection! So effectively you could
lose your office in a fire, and be back online in 10 minutes
by connecting your backup hard drive to a spare IDE connector
of a computer.
Damon continues: “We have
five HS-R’s at AGI all connected to workstations. At
the end of each day the backup trays are placed in a fire proof
data safe so our data is completely protected. Few design studios
have a disaster recovery scenario in place, but we have a 5
year archive on an HS-R tray off site, so if we did lose the
office in a fire, the business data would be back online again
as soon as we could get some computers.” |
Each of AGI's Workstation is linked to one or two MediaBank
HS-R |
| “ By using the Miglia HS-R we save ourselves at least 30 minutes per user
a day. The LaCie drives we had before were good reliable units, but we physically
had to copy the data from out work servers at the end of each day as they were
not mirrored Raid disks. This inevitably caused problems as the backup could
be forgotten or there was not time, as obviously it would be slower to use the
work servers while the disks were being copied.” |
The
Future
The Miglia MediaBank HS-R’s are very scalable as the capacity
depends on the size of the hard drives placed in the trays, the
capacity at the moment can be as much as 320 GB from some hard
drive manufacturers. The fact that you have the trays is very
convenient for scalability as you can add in more hard drives
to the backup cycle at any point. Due to AGI’s current
excellent business growth, it keeps expanding its computing park
with new PowerMacs G5s and MediaBank HS-Rs. |
Essentials
About the Miglia MediaBank HS-R:
Featuring two easily removable hard drive trays and hardware
support for Raid 1 (mirroring), MediaBank HS-R
is one of the most secure storage solutions available today.
Data is written
to two hard drives simultaneously, preventing total
data loss if a drive were to fail. Hardware support for mirroring
removes potential software conflicts and guarantees
a
faultless and automatic backup of your vital data. MediaBank
HS-R ships with a spare hard drive tray, allowing you
to keep
a drive containing all your data in a secure location,
which is an automatic backup facility! The MediaBank
HS-R is now
also available as an internal drive for PC users – The
Miglia MediaBank
HS-Ri.
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