Spaulding & Slye Colliers

Keeping Real Estate Data Safe with LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery

Customer Challenge:
To protect critical business server data distributed across multiple servers and locations.

Spaulding & Slye Colliers, An Integrated Real Estate Services Company
The call couldn’t have come at a worse time for John Rinaldi. An analyst in his firm had just botched a property report consolidation and lost a vital financial system directory. The analyst called Rinaldi, Assistant Vice President of Information Technology for Spaulding & Slye Colliers, to ask if the directory could be restored. And, the data was needed quickly to meet an important deadline.

As an integrated real estate services company delivering solutions to corporate and investor clients, Spaulding & Slye Colliers tracks vital property information for building owners and landlords. On this particular day, the two employees responsible for server backup and recovery were out of the office, so Rinaldi would have to do the data recovery himself. The only problem was that Rinaldi had never actually done a data recovery with the company’s new solution: LiveVault® Online Backup and Recovery Service.

"When we were backing up on tape, I always worried that someone 
might skip a night, or there would be problems with the tapes if we 
needed to do a data recovery. Now I don’t even have to think about it, 
because I know our backup is being done right all the time."

Once he opened up the LiveVault Web interface, his fears vanished. The interface was so intuitive that in just three minutes he was able to completely recover the directory. The result: an ecstatic property manager, the timely delivery of accurate information to the client, and a relieved Rinaldi—all thanks to LiveVault.

Trusted Protection, Total Server Backup and Recovery
Spaulding & Slye Colliers is based in Boston, and maintains offices in Washington, D.C. and Lexington, Mass. The company provides leasing, investment sales, structured finance, construction, development services, retail services, and property and facility management services to companies worldwide.

Spaulding & Slye Colliers relies on a broad range of property, portfolio, and market information to manage its business. Thus, it is critical for the company to have a comprehensive data protection program.

Several years ago the company backed up this data through its own server backup and recovery network, running a T1 line into its Lexington office. However, the volume of data involved in the nightly backups quickly grew to the point where that mode of backup was impractical, and there was no way for the company to reduce the load by implementing "smart" incremental backups.

The company then moved to decentralized tape-based server backup, in which each location was responsible for backing up its own data—an approach that quickly created a new set of problems. "Tape-based server backup was not an acceptable solution because there were too many potential points of failure," said Michele FitzGerald, Director of Information Technology for Spaulding & Slye Colliers. "There were multiple employees involved, cataloging tapes was confusing and cumbersome, and accessing the tapes when you needed them could take hours or days, because most of the tapes were removed offsite to our other offices."

Online Server Backup and Recovery As a Competitive Advantage
To solve its server backup and recovery problems, Spaulding & Slye Colliers began looking at online solutions as a way to simplify their backup and data recovery operations while providing offsite data protection. "It is critical for us to ensure that the data is protected, and backed up regularly, without depending on any one employee to do it," FitzGerald said.

Spaulding & Slye Colliers initially selected an online backup and recovery solution, but soon discovered that its client/server interface was difficult to use and the service did not work well with the company’s SQL server environment.

After continuing its evaluation, Spaulding & Slye Colliers found its ideal solution: the LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service.

"We selected the LiveVault service because it works extremely
well with our SQL Server environment, and we love the Web user interface," Rinaldi said. "That interface came in handy when
I had to do that recovery."

Rinaldi added that LiveVault’s Online Backup & Recovery Service provides a competitive advantage for the company. Spaulding & Slye Colliers manages properties for a broad range of large investors, all of whom are keenly interested in understanding how the firm protects property data from disaster.

"Many times, before a company will sign a contract with us to manage their property, I have to fill out a survey that discusses our backup and recovery capabilities," Rinaldi said. "Being able to tell them that  data is backed up automatically and securely stored at an offsite facility, and that the process can be controlled through a simple Web interface, is a powerful advantage we have over other management companies with less sophisticated operations."

Spaulding & Slye Colliers currently protects 300 gigabytes of data across five locations with the LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service. According to FitzGerald, the old worries about tape-based backup never occur to her any more.