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AppAssure Software, a leading developer of award-winning backup and disaster recovery software products for mission-critical Windows application servers, today announced that Village Bank, a midsized community bank which serves the Richmond metro area, switched to AppAssure’s Replay 4 backup and recovery software to overcome 50% failure rate with Symantec Backup Exec’s tape backup system. With Replay’s state-of-the-art disk imaging solution the bank is stated to have reached reliability, ease, and comprehensive disaster recovery planning ability.
“We’re a midsized bank which also owns a mortgage company,” explains Bob Thomas, Vice President of Information Technology at Village Bank. “We have 18 locations around the Richmond area and a staff size of about 230 people. Our infrastructure includes mortgage loan origination applications, Fiserve’s bank imaging system, and client account opening software platforms all running on our SQL servers. Plus we’re a service bureau bank, which means we work with Fiserve, who does the heavy lifting of core processing of accounts payable, account management, and so on. So there’s a lot going on at any one time. We were using Symantec Backup Exec 12 and our backup jobs were continually failing, leading to questionable recovery scenarios.”
As Thomas estimates, his three-person IT team had to deal with unacceptable failure rates of up to 50% — regularly.
“We would do a daily backup which ran three to six hours a night, and then a full backup on Friday, plus a monthly,” says Thomas. “We don’t have a staff to come in on Saturday, so we’d get the backup on Monday and about 50% of the time, find an error. There wasn’t much we could do about it because we couldn’t afford to rerun the backup, so we’d just note we had had a failure and hope we wouldn’t need to recover anything, because if something failed, we’d be out two weeks of data. We thought about redoing the backup schedule, and looked at another tape mechanism, but it was just too expensive for us. We’d call Symantec on the failures, but they could only recommend a patch or have us waiting for the next version.”
According to Thomas, this nightmare scenario was made all the worse by the fact that the bank had grown so much in the last couple of years that it was expanding faster than Backup Exec’s solution could keep up with it. “The failing backup jobs put the company at risk when a recovery is required,” says Thomas emphatically. “Since the number of tapes and time required to do a full backup was increasing, we knew that we needed a more secure and reliable process for the bank.”
Thomas’s team came across AppAssure, and did a Replay trial. Within 15 minutes, states Thomas, Village Bank’s servers were all up and protected by Replay in a test mode. Thomas chose Replay.
“Our backups are running much quicker and the time to recovery is cut from hours and days to just minutes,” says Thomas. “Not only that, but the ability to go into Exchange store and restore one E: with Replay has been eye opening.
As Thomas states, Village Bank now feels confident that its data is protected as it looks to the future. “Replay has completely changed our DR strategy because we have the time to focus on the future,” says Thomas. Village Bank can now meet its goal of doing replication off-site, which is what is up next on IT team’s plate, adds Thomas.
“The bottom line,” says Thomas,“is that Replay lives up to the hype. I would encourage anyone who is looking for a good backup and disaster recovery solution to take those words to heart. Replay does what it says it does.”
About Village Bank
Headquartered in Midlothian, VA, outside of Richmond, Village Bank is a midsized community bank which has served the Richmond metro area for over 11 years. In addition, Village Bank’s mortgage company, Village Bank Mortgage Corp., has offices in Midlothian, Manassas and Hanover, VA.
About AppAssure Replay 4
Replay 4 is the world’s fastest and easiest backup and disaster recovery software for Windows application servers, VMware and Hyper-V Virtual Servers. The only complete “all-in-one” backup and recovery solution, Replay 4 enables local recoveries from any type of failure in just minutes, with the added assurance of offsite application and image backup and bare metal recovery from a total site disaster.
About AppAssure Software
AppAssure Software (appassure.com) is a leading provider of innovative backup and disaster recovery software for Windows application servers. AppAssure’s flagship product, Replay 4 is an application-aware, disk-based imaging solution that automatically and continuously snapshots entire Windows application servers delivering accelerated application backups and disaster recovery for in minutes.
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smtoole[.]appassure.com 
