Overview
The Colibri Group is a privately-held company that designs, manufactures and markets branded jewelry, lighters and accessories and clocks. Based in Providence, R.I., the company was founded in 1968 and now sells its products through 20,000 customer outlets throughout the United States and employs more than 300 people at its two locations in Providence and Cranston, R.I.
Challenge
Colibri has always used a tape backup system to protect its data. Each evening the company’s iSeries system in Providence would be backed up on tapes and then sent via a courier the next day to its Cranston location where it was securely stored in a safe.
“The challenge with this tape backup solution was that our two locations are only five miles apart and if there was a major disaster in the Northeast, or in just Rhode Island, we were putting our data at both locations at risk,” explained Al Baker, senior network engineer for Colibri. “We needed to find an off-site backup solution that would ensure the protection of our data if a disaster does occur.”
Solution
Colibri first implemented IBM’s tape backup solution to provide a quicker backup service with off-site storage, but this solution came with a high price tag.
“We looked at Cloudfirst’s disaster recovery solution, which was much more cost effective than the IBM tape backup,” explained Baker. “ Cloudfirst had implemented its disaster recovery solution for many other organizations and has a strong expertise working in iSeries environments. With the lower cost, Cloudfirst’s expertise and its off-site backup being located far from our facilities, it was the logical choice.”
Colibri’s iSeries environment hosts all of its shipping, sales, electronic data interchange (EDI) and warehouse management system applications. Working with more than 20,000 customer outlets, the data and solutions hosted on this system are critical to the company’s operations.
“If we had a disaster, we would need to recover our data within 24 to 48 hours to minimize the impact to our business and lost revenues,” said Baker. “CloudFirst/DR provides us with this capability.”
CloudFirst/DR is subscription-based solution using leading-edge electronic vaulting technologies to identify and back up only incremental changes to data. In an emergency, CloudFirst/DR also performs a disk-to-disk restore of the data to a standby server at one of Cloudfirst’s data centers, enabling Colibri to access, restore, and recover its systems and data in 10 hours or less.
Return on Investment
“CloudFirst/DR is essentially an insurance policy for our data, applications and computer networks,” explained Baker. “We hope we never have a hardware failure and need to rely on CloudFirst/DR, but we know if we do, our data will be protected.”
Colibri implemented its solution over a year ago. “The initial setup was fantastic,” said Baker. “The project manager was extremely helpful. Cloudfirst performed many test backups to smaller libraries and made the transition from tape a very smooth process for us.”
He continued, “ Cloudfirst has implemented this solution many times for iSeries environments and we feel very confident in the solution we selected.”
