With data centers geographically dispersed throughout the world, Topcon Positioning Systems, needed a backup and recovery solution that protected all their systems and was simple to use with their physical and virtual servers. NetVault Plus replaced their existing backup and recovery platform because it was more cost-effective and could handle their data centers located in multiple locations.
I’ve been with Topcon for 11 years, and I have said jokingly I would quit my job if they ever got rid of Quest® NetVault® Plus and QoreStor®.
Topcon Positioning Systems, Inc. (TPS) designs and manufactures precise positioning products and solutions for global surveying, construction, agriculture, civil engineering, mapping and GIS, asset management and mobile control markets. The company has worldwide employee operations and dealer networks. Topcon Corporation was founded in 1932. It is the parent company of TPS and is traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Topcon Positioning System’s IT team has been a loyal customer of Quest since 2013. When the time came to upgrade their existing backup platform with a more cost-effective solution that could protect all their systems, applications, and data, their decision was easy.
After consulting with their Quest sales representative, Topcon chose NetVault Plus, which is a bundle of Quest NetVault enterprise data protection software with Quest QoreStor data deduplication, replication and cloud connection software.
“We didn’t have enough storage capacity and our backup platform needed to be replaced, so we invested in Quest NetVault Plus because it made sense for us financially and we could see that it could do the job,” said Ernie Vega.
Their organization had a complex IT infrastructure that would benefit from enterprise-class, cross-platform data protection that’s easy to use right out of the box and scales easily to accommodate data growth. They wanted to protect a variety of servers containing petabytes of data — from one web-based console. And they wanted support for multiple operating systems, applications, databases and storage devices. Such cross-platform versatility makes it easy to tailor NetVault Plus to match its IT infrastructure’s ever-changing and complicated landscape.
As in most companies, budgets are shrinking, and funds are limited. NetVault Plus gave Topcon an affordable solution that reduced storage requirements by up to 90% and significantly reduced on-premises storage costs.
“Look, we’re saving a lot of money with Quest because we don’t need to worry about more capacity and more space for backups” said Ernie Vega.
In the United States, Topcon has six data center locations that send their replicated data to Livermore, California, as a secondary backup location as part of their disaster recovery strategy. In turn, anything unique to their Livermore location goes to Olathe, Kansas, where they have the exact same setup in place. With NetVault Plus, they can take advantage of powerful replication, deduplication and secondary storage options.
It didn’t take long for the NetVault Plus results to reach their Moscow location. “After hearing about our success, I flew out a couple of times to set them up and show them how it works, and now they love it.”
Quest has an intelligent, automated deduplication aware balancer that spreads the load dynamically, keeping “like” data together while spreading the load across any number of QoreStor servers. This keeps storage efficiency and performance high, reducing the risk of segregated data chains while simultaneously simplifying management tasks since the rest of the system treats it as if it were a single device. The storage pool becomes a logical representation of all storage. You would have just one storage pool and start with one QoreStor instance. When you’re running low on storage space, you can simply add another QoreStor instance into the mix.
Ernie Vega went on to say, “It’s nice because our backups happen in the expected timeframe, and we’re seeing a lot better performance over in the entire network.”
Topcon also wanted to simplify backup and recovery for their large, complex IT environment and protect all applications and data on-premises, in remote offices— from one intuitive console — with a scalable backup and restore solution.
They wanted a solution that they could eventually grow into with capabilities to protect Windows and Linux servers along with Office 365, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Oracle, SAP, SAP HANA, DB2, MySQL and many other applications in physical, virtual and cloud environments. And they wanted to support a wide range of storage, including SAN, NAS, VTL and tape, depending on the requirements of their various data centers.
Quest has a wide range of service and support features, including a knowledge base, user forums to connect with peers and technical documentation. Over the years, Topcon has had two sales representatives with whom they have built both professional and personal relationships with over the years. They often reached out to them with questions, confident they would hear back from them in a timely manner.
Ernie Vega stated, “We don’t have many backups issues, or at least we haven’t so far, but we know we can reach out at any time to support or any of our sales reps for assistance.”
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