Quadrupling Backup Speed with Solutions from Symantec & Managed Solutions

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Garden City Christian Church could only back up half its data each night— and that data was growing 50 percent each year. So the Church switched to Symantec Backup Exec. Now backups are four times faster than with the previous solution, and the Church can back up all its data every night. Another problem was the proliferation of often-offensive spam. Deploying Symantec Multi-tier Protection reduced spam in a typical employee's mailbox from as many as 200 messages a day to less than one message a day, a 99.5% reduction in spam volumes.

Search and rescue

In Luke 19:10 (NIV), Jesus defines part of his mission as "...to seek and save what was lost." Garden City Christian Church, a large Pentecostal Church in Brisbane, is taking this idea forward with its focus on "Search & Rescue" - which has led the church to extend its reach all over the globe, building an orphanage in Indonesia, encouraging new churches, supporting existing churches, and working to help communities in developing countries. In Australia, the church is a pioneer in providing a ministry for the deaf, including a special deaf church.

The Church has special IT needs: in addition to the usual email and productivity functions, it also produces videos and CDs, and even streams live services in Thailand to parishioners at a simultaneous service back in Brisbane. The task of managing IT falls to Stephen Morton, information,communications, and technology manager, who also manages the Church's 15,000-volume library— it's a combination one of his colleagues describes as two 40-hour jobs squeezed into one 40-hour week.

Morton accomplishes this balancing act with the help of Managed Solutions, a Symantec partner based in nearby Ipswich, which has been providing IT support and consulting to the Church since 2002. "Where I don't have the expertise, Managed Solutions can provide it," Morton says. "I know if I get on the phone to them, there are people within the organization, or their contacts that can find the solution. There’s no way I could get that expertise without hours and hours of training."

Four times faster backups

In 2008, the Church asked for Managed Solutions’ advice about how to cope with its nightly backups, which go directly to its tape drive. At the time the Church was using EMC Retrospect to perform backups, but its data to be backed up had grown to about 150 gigabytes, and the Church was only able to back up half its data during its nightly backup window. "It put half our data at risk for a day," Morton says. "We lost data a couple of times. It was a big problem." At the same time, the Church was planning to install a more powerful server, and its backup needs were continuing to grow at the rate of 50 percent per year. Morton knew it was time for a new solution. Managed Solutions recommended a switch to Symantec Backup Exec™, which the Church implemented in mid-2008. "We've been very happy with it ever since," Morton says. "Our volume of data continues to grow year by year, and Symantec Backup Exec will be able to handle that growth for a long time to come."

Symantec Backup Exec is about four times faster than EMC Retrospect was, Morton notes. "It used to take four to five hours for a nightly backup with Retrospect," Morton says. "It takes four hours with Backup Exec. But we had about half the data volume back then, and we were only backing up half at a time. So Backup Exec is taking a quarter of the time that Retrospect did." Backup and restore accuracy was high with Retrospect, he adds, but it’s even better with Backup Exec. "The only time I get a failure notice is if we’ve done something wrong, rather than Backup Exec," he says. "Other than that, it’s close to 100 percent." And restores are 100 percent accurate, he adds.

Protection from spam

At around the same time, Garden City Christian Church was struggling with an ever increasing volume of spam. Morton says he would typically receive about 200 spam messages a day, and other Church employees might receive 50 to 100 spam messages. Sorting and deleting these was not only time-consuming but vastly unpleasant, he notes. "Particularly in a church context, even just the subject lines are unacceptable." Symantec Mail Security for Exchange with Premium AntiSpam as part of Symantec Mutli-tier

Protection was able to address this problem.

The Church had Norton SystemWorks™ installed on each of its desktops and laptops for protection against malware. Managed Solutions then suggested a move to Symantec™ Multi-tier Protection. Since deploying Symantec Multi-tier Protection in 2008, the spam has virtually vanished Morton says. "If I get one spam message in two days, that’s unusual," he says. "Virtually no spam goes through the inbox now." The same is true for other Church employees, he adds.

Since deploying Symantec Endpoint Protection, the Church has experienced no malware- related disruptions he says, and notes that the software reports blocking 7,715 threats blocked per day. Better yet, Morton says, when fully implemented, Multi-tier Protection will save him a lot of time because he'll be able to deploy patches and otherwise manage endpoint security from a central console. "There will be virtually no occasion when I have to go to someone's computer to deal with antivirus software," he says. "That's going to save me considerable time. To begin with, it will save 50 hours a year I would spend replacing the antivirus software on each employee's computer."

A partner's recommendation

Morton says the Church opted for Symantec products for one simple reason: Managed Solutions advised them. "We trust them to recommend the best products to meet our needs," he says.

And Managed Solutions recommends Symantec products because they've found them to be the best, says Mark Smits, senior technical officer at Managed Solutions. "We don't support anything else or sell anything else, and we don't recommend anything else at all," he says. "We've gone through and tested different products, including ones from Trend Micro and McAfee. The Symantec product offerings, Multi-tier Protection and Backup Exec, are just the top of the game. From our testing, and with the product support we get, there’s really no comparison."