Atempo Live Navigator (Lina) case study - Barchester Healthcare, UK
"Atempo support is great, the products are great" Andy G., Barchester Healthcare IT Manager, Inverness, Scotland.
Barchester Healthcare is one of the UK’s largest quality care providers delivering high quality care services to more than 11,000 people in over 200 homes across Great Britain.
The level of care provided to residents is top quality and the home environments are warm, friendly and comfortable. The calibre and training of the 17,000 staff is unrivalled.
THE CHALLENGE - PROTECT CAREHOME AND ROAMING DATA TO A CENTRAL LOCATION
Barchester’s IT infrastructure is managed out of their facilities in Inverness in the North of Scotland. We spoke to the two IT managers Scott and Andy responsible for ensuring the smooth data protection for all care homes and also for all itinerant workers with vital data stored locally in the homes and in the roaming laptops.
The company has deployed two Atempo solutions for a number of years: Time Navigator (Tina) to back up and restore critical applications in the head office and Live Navigator (Lina) to protect file data in each care home and also the laptops in circulation around the UK.
Tina ensures Exchange mail servers and SQL Server databases are fully protected. Recovering MS Exchange mail boxes or individual emails is always crucial for any company because unique and key data is often stored in an email attachment. The Atempo time navigation restore feature allows granular mail retrieval or mailbox restore and of course total Exchange server recovery in the event of a crash or cyberattack. Barchester currently protects upwards of 5 TB of physical and virtual server data.
When it came to choosing a new backup solution for Barchester, Tina and Lina hit the spot in terms of available features. Simplicity was another factor and Scott half-jokingly says “If it takes us more than 5 minutes to install and make it run, we simply aren’t interested!”. The products need to be discreet. Care home staff are focused on quality care for residents not handling IT issues.
Lina runs in the background of each home with five or six workstations using a shared data disk running a backup agent. Files on this disk are then backed up by Lina to the Inverness storage.
“Staff are only aware that there is a backup when they make a restoration request. WHEN We send them theIR fileS, THEY Are of course delighted to get their data back safe and sound”
The 200 plus homes and the nomadic workforce (or Road Warriors as they are affectionately known at Barchester) all rely on Lina for file protection needs. Bandwidth speeds to transfer data to the central server in Scotland vary but this doesn’t stop files from being fully and safely backed up even when transfer speeds are under 1 mbps. This is because Lina includes CDP – Continuous Data Protection- to ensure that data is sent in block mode as a continuous stream. This technology added to powerful deduplication (only unique blocks are transferred) makes multiple stream backup a reality.
Both Atempo backup solutions play key roles in ensuring Barchester’s ongoing business continuity and data security
Adding new licences and new clients is very straightforward with Atempo’s very clear and economical licencing structure. “We know where we are with our licences and are able to add new users and increase backup volumes very simply” adds Andy.
Andy and Scott are pleased to work with Atempo and enjoy good working relationships with UK-based teams. Barchester opens a new residence almost every month and additional data and agent licences are quickly deployed and integrated into the existing backup infrastructure. Simplicity, economy and efficiency firmly at the heart of Atempo and Barchester’s data protection partnership.
