UCG Lauded for Test Work by VAULT400 Customer

June 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

In the event of a disaster, your chances of recovery are only as good as your last test. Thanks to the testing work that Atlas Paper Mills did with IBM i cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) services provider VAULT400, its chances of surviving a disaster are better.

Testing is a critical element of a complete disaster recovery plan. But all too often, tests don’t go deep enough or last long enough to truly simulate bringing a system back online following a disaster. Short tests may allow organizations to check “DR test” off their list and make happy with auditors for compliance purposes. But organizations won’t discover the hidden problems in their plans until they do an accurate simulation of the recovery.

The folks at VAULT400 are big backers of thorough and repeated DR testing (see “Anatomy of a (Successful) Cloud DR Test” for their approach). They understand that when a test uncovers a problem, it shouldn’t be considered a failure, but a little gift from the DR gods.

That is what happened when the Miami, Florida-based recycled paper company Atlas Paper Mills recently tested its VAULT400 DR backup plan. It ran into a little snag, and worked with the VAULT400 administrators at United Computer Group to fix the problem.

“In our last test, it was discovered that a small program was missing,” Atlas Paper Mills’ IT manager Luis Cordero says in a press release. “UCG’s engineering team helped find the solution and worked with us to verify a successful DR test.”

VAULT400 is a cloud-based backup and recovery service that uses a combination of EVault‘s online backup technology and UCG’s cloud recovery center. UCG gives VAULT400 customers several options when it comes to recovery time objectives (RTO), including 12-hour, 24-hour, and 48-hour services.

In Atlas Paper Mills’ case, the company selected the 24-hour RTO, ensuring that its critical IBM i applications will be ready to resume production on a dedicated partition of a UCG IBM i server within one day of a disaster declaration. VAULT400 also offers a one-hour RTO option that utilizes high availability data replication technology from Maxava.

Atlas Paper Mills is a leading US manufacturer of recycled paper products,. The company’s tissue paper manufacturing process is free of chlorine and other potentially harmful chemicals. The company produces more than 36,000 tons of recycled tissue products per year, and converts approximately 3 million cases of Eco-friendly towels and tissue for use in the Away From Home and Retail Marketplace.