Member2Member Case Study

Customer Quote

“I was losing sleep at night, worrying about what would happen if we had a disaster that resulted in us losing our critical business data. Like most print and design companies, our storage demands are high, meaning cloud backup solutions were not cost-effective, and manual backup methods were impractical.

“With the real-time replication system implemented by McLaren Technology Solutions, our data is continually backed up to a remote location, safeguarding us against hardware failure, disasters, malware and theft.”

Iain Robertson, JJR Print Limited

 

Introduction

JJR Print Limited is a family-run  print and design bureau located in Dumbarton, West Dunbartonshire. It was founded over a hundred years ago, and has been run by the Robertson family since the 1940s. JJR Print offers a wide range of services to both businesses and the public, and has customers throughout Scotland.

JJR Print contacted us for help designing and installing an updated storage  and backup solution, which would offer as much resilience as possible to protect the valuable data that the business depends on.

 

Executive Summary

McLaren Technology Solutions analysed JJR Print’s current technology platform, and identified several areas where risks were present and improvements could be made. A solution was proposed and implemented that delivered the key objectives of the project, including real-time off-site data replication, significantly reducing the risks to the business.

 

Challenges

A particular challenge of the print and design industry is the data capacity required to store high-resolution artwork and photographs. Individual files can easily consume many hundreds of megabytes, and finding a backup approach that can cope with such a volume in a cost-effective manner is key.

There is also a large amount of data exchange with customers, as drafts are received, proofs sent out, and so on, leading to a substantial risk of viruses or malware entering the network.

JJR’s previous solution had been a single Network Attached Storage (NAS) fileserver, with manual backups being performed in a highly time-consuming and unreliable manner. This process was reliant on the operator being on site, and having the time to do it.

The project goals were to upgrade the storage capacity available, improve performance of file access, to have a lights-out/hands-off approach to backup, to be resilient against hardware failure and other disasters, and to have an off-site mirror of their data.

 

Our Solution

We quickly identified that a key technology benefit in many areas of Scotland, and in particular West Dunbartonshire, is the availability of super-fast broadband. This meant that we could provide JJR Print with all the benefits of a cloud backup solution, without the associated recurring subscription costs.

After taking into account JJR’s current and projected storage requirements, we Implemented two new NAS fileservers- one on-premise, and the other at a remote location. The device in the factory was configured        to replicate files in real-time to the remote one, using a secure connection between the two via the internet.

Not content with this level of backup, we also enabled the ‘snapshot’ facility on the NAS servers. This allows staff to recover a file to a previous point in time if it has become corrupted or overwritten.

Anti-virus scanning was also enabled on the new NAS devices, protecting JJR against the threat of potential malware being stored on their network, and automated alerts notify of any problems that may require attention.

 

Conclusion

JJR Print’s new storage and replication solution has successfully delivered the objectives the project set out to achieve, and has significantly reduced the risks associated with data loss or corruption.
For a no-obligation discussion about how McLaren Technology Solutions could benefit your business, please contact:

www.mclarentech.co.uk
[email protected]
05603 675674