Organization Background:
Standard Parking is a leading national provider of parking facility management services, providing on-site management services at multi-level and surface parking facilities for all major markets of the parking industry. The company manages parking facilities containing more than one million parking spaces in hundreds of cities across the U.S. and Canada.
Challenges
Prior to selecting Data Storage Corp. (DSC), all Standard Parking’s data was backed up on tape with an off-site data recovery location. Under an annual fee arrangement, the recovery time was 48 hours and involved two vendors.
Selecting a Partner:
Standard Parking wanted to recover certain elements of both its IBM i and MS Windows (Intel) environments and have one provider manage both of their platforms.
Patrick Gallagher, V.P. of Technology at Standard Parking explained that the parking company selected DSC’s DSC DR (data recovery) services because DSC “could turn up both environments as a managed service with one re-direction of the VPN.”
Current Environment
Standard Parking uses the DSC DR solution to ensure the backup and recovery of its file servers, email system, ERP solution, accounting application, contracts and Use Tax Base system.
DSC’s DSC DR, powered by Asigra, was designed for those organizations with recovery time objectives of 10 hours or less running in a Windows/Intel and an IBM System i environment. As a subscription-based service, it is a viable option requiring no capital expenditure. Leveraging electronic vaulting technology, DSC DR is an online backup and recovery service that gives organizations remote access to mirrored data and a full functioning recovery system within hours of a disruption.
Return on Investment
With its general office, multiple garage locations, Standard Parking has distributed systems and needs to ensure availability of its data, applications and systems to multiple remote locations.
Gallagher mentioned that one of the largest benefits from using DSC’s DSC DR is the ease-of-use. Because the backup is performed unattended and there are no tapes to transport, there are no requirements put on the IT staff.
He also said that the incremental file recovery and knowing that they now have a 10-hour or less recovery window are important benefits of the DSC DSC DR solution. Gallagher concluded by saying that DSC has helped them through a lot of rough patches over the years.