Zmanda, a provider of open source backup and recovery software, announced that Zen Innovations based in Switzerland has selected and deployed Amanda Enterprise to backup and protect its corporate data.
Through the use of a web-based tool called Global Trade Tracker, Zen provides access to original trade statistics from the world's largest 55 principal trading countries to its customers. Global Trade Tracker provides a clear and objective picture of trade flows and provides critical information on the value and quantity of goods (e.g., oil, precious metals, food, live stock, frozen goods, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals) being imported and exported around the world. The company provides monthly trade figures to customers and provides information on the value being imported or exported as well as the quantity of goods.
Initially, to manage all of the data, Zen used scripts and manual backup procedures, according to Sergio Laberer, managing director for Zen. "Our initial manual processes and scripts quickly started to get complicated as we grew our infrastructure," says Laberer. Zen needed to do backups regularly and be in a position to recover quickly without too much manual intervention. Zen's initial approach was neither scalable nor suitable to work efficiently.
Zen selected Amanda Enterprise on the basis of its ability to manage multiple platforms using a web-based GUI. "We are a technology-agnostic firm," states Laberer, noting the firm operates in a "fairly heterogeneous environment" where various operating systems such as Solaris, Linux, Windows, Mac OS and databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL coexist.
The company was in need of a system that was able to back up as much as possible under one roof. "We also needed a low-cost solution as we are a startup company with a limited budget," Laberer says. "As we have a large amount of experience in open source, we had no objection whatsoever to consider an open source product and found Amanda Enterprise to provide the best match for our needs: the ability to backup all our systems with a convenient web-based interface at an affordable cost."
Zen purchased Amanda Enterprise and installed it on a backup server running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10. The company uses Zmanda backup clients for SLES 10, Solaris 10, Mac OS X, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Pro. About 650 GB of data is backed up to a Sun StorageTek SL 24 Tape Autoloader per night.
Zen's servers also hold web-based custom applications that are hosted for customers as well as internal servers such as mail and file servers. Zen systems engineers must have the ability to recover data quickly, as most of these systems need to be operational 24x7 with minimal downtime.
For more details on Zmanda open source backup, go here.