Iskratel is the leading European ICT provider for digital transformation in the telecommunications, transport, public safety, and energy industries. With its own R&D and manufacturing centers, over 900 employees, and global footprint in more than 50 countries, Iskratel combines experience and expertise with creativity and innovation.
As a growing business, and with data storage requirements increasing 20 to 30 percent every year, data backup is a strategic issue for Iskratel. With more sophisticated requirements, Iskratel wanted to optimize its storage strategy, as well as licensing for Micro Focus Data Protector, which had been in use for many years. Anton Kavcic, IT Director for Iskratel, explains further: “Our environment is hybrid, with a mix of physical and virtual storage targets, and we support different OS platforms. We wanted to streamline and simplify our storage by introducing HPE StoreOnce, and our backup solution had to integrate with this. With our strategy moving more towards virtual data storage, our Data Protector licensing model needed to be reviewed. Plus, we were aware that we needed to upgrade to a more recent version to take advantage of advanced backup capabilities.”
Iskratel wants to drive digital transformation, expanding into different industries. To do more with less, optimizing costs and prioritizing investments was important. As part of the review of Data Protector, Iskratel decided to compare Data Protector with other market alternatives.
Iskratel had been extremely satisfied with Data Protector’s reliability and functionality, and the team used this experience to put together comprehensive evaluation criteria to measure any backup solution against. The solution needed to support remote office protection, data backup to a public cloud environment (Azure), and have the ability to backup and restore very old data, of 8+ years. It needed to offer good integration capabilities within Iskratel’s infrastructure, consisting of HPE StoreOnce, VLS9000, and LTO tapes as a long-term archive. Iskratel also looked for extremely advanced application integration opportunities for its SAP and SQL environments, as well as easy and intuitive management.
Iskratel evaluated leading backup vendors, including Micro Focus. Kavcic on the evaluation process: “We investigated investments costs, licensing model and policies, implementation complexity, support models, especially here in Slovenia, functionality and special features, such as cloud and SAP compatibility, and ease of use. We chose Data Protector as that meets all our physical and virtual data protection and storage requirements. It provides great integration with our existing infrastructure, and we received excellent support from Micro Focus during the evaluation and decision process. Furthermore, an upgrade to the latest Data Protector version changed and optimized our licensing structure.”
Iskratel leverages Data Protector to protect 200TB of data. The data flows from MSL libraries to HPE StoreOnce and VLS9000 and is backed up to disk with Data Protector’s federated deduplication capabilities. For redundancy and disaster recovery purposes, the data is replicated to another location, 130km away. The team takes different data protection approaches, with not just backup, but also data snapshots and clones on VMware and HPE 3PAR storage. Special procedures are in place to only backup configured files.
Strengthening its investment in Data Protector has set Iskratel up for the future, and Kavcic has ambitious plans: “We want to implement cloud backup and further optimize our virtual environment backup. We are also very interested in exploring the integrated reporting and the Business Value Dashboards (BVD) provided within Data Protector. These will help us make better, data-driven, business decisions.”
He concludes: “Our ongoing support for Data Protector is serving us well. The easy to use interface means it’s cost-effective to manage, and we are confident of both a three and five year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). We also achieve excellent success rates in our backups. In fact, we are pleased to report 100 percent success rate for the 50 data restores we processed in the last year. We feel confident that Data Protector will continue to meet our needs.”
