Brunel GmbH Consolidates Backup and Recovery Across 30 Branch Offices

EMC AutoStart and EMC NetWorker Software Provide IT and Engineering Consultancy with Faster Backup and Recovery, Less Downtime and More Efficient Operations.

Hopkinton, Mass.-Wednesday, February 8, 2006, EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced that Brunel GmbH has centralized and automated the recovery management of its core sales database across 30 branch offices. By deploying EMC’s information protection and recovery management software, the Germany-based IT and engineering firm has dramatically faster backup and recovery processes, better information availability and achieved significant cost savings.

Enno Schulz, Brunel’s head of internal IT, said, "Centralizing our backup and recovery operations has freed many more hours in the day for our branch office staff to focus their energies on customers and revenue-generating projects. With EMC recovery management software, we can fully backup our critical sales database in three hours instead of the eight hours it used to take. Our time to recover from failed server nodes has decreased from 45 to five minutes. In fact, we have not experienced any downtime since deploying EMC. We’re also saving money on outside IT services because our backup and recovery processes are far more automated and reliable"

Because Brunel manages some of its customers’ most critical IT and engineering projects, the company’s branch offices require rapid, 24x7 access to customer and order information stored at the primary data center. Before, if a primary server failed, operations were moved to the cold standby server. Because the standby server was backed up infrequently, up-to-the-minute information was not available to the branches until the production server resumed operation. As a result, there could be a delay in the branch offices’ ability to service and invoice customers.

As one component of its information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy, Brunel now uses EMC AutoStart™ to provide continuous data availability for a two-node cluster of Windows servers. Citrix file services, such as printing and profiles, reside on one node and Brunel’s Firebird sales database runs on the other. If one node fails, AutoStart automatically directs the other node to take over its server name, IP address, disks and applications. This way, branch offices are assured reliable access to the centralized servers.

"If server failover becomes necessary, EMC AutoStart automatically moves applications, data and users to the operational server node" explained Schulz. "Our branch offices remain productive and business operations can continue uninterrupted. Our IT staff no longer loses hours or even days reactively responding to server failures"

Brunel’s prior backup and recovery operations utilized CA’s BrightStor ARCserve Backup software to backup servers to IBM SLR100 tape drives. Because each server had its own tape drive, the IT staff needed to backup one server at a time. To address this, Brunel has implemented EMC NetWorker® software to centrally and automatically backup contracts, correspondences and other transactions to Sun storage and tape.

Schulz stated, "Using EMC NetWorker, we’re able to perform fast and accurate backups with minimal involvement of our IT staff. Moreover, NetWorker runs in the background so that it doesn’t interfere with user operations"

"We have reached our goal of making data centrally available" said Schulz. "Today, all of our offices can access a central data pool stored at our main datacenter. In case of local failures, we can mitigate the effects by using the advanced business continuity functions of EMC AutoStart and EMC NetWorker"

Creative Computer Consulting GmbH, an EMC partner, assisted Brunel with the planning, design and implementation of its EMC backup and recovery solutions.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information management and storage that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.
For more on EMC news, events, and recent media coverage visit the news section of EMC.com. Note to editors: For further information about this release contact EMC Public Relations at pr@emc.com
EMC and NetWorker are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. AutoStart is a trademark of EMC Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

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