We were quite impressed by how well DocAve was able to backup and recover SharePoint objects, and it was very easy to use.
An organization that plays a very important role in the Pacific Northwest, the port uses SharePoint 2010 to support and empower its staff and business processes in multiple ways.
The port’s intranet is housed on SharePoint, and more than 2,000 end users access the platform for organizational information and updates. Additionally, all teams across the port use the platform to manage, collaborate on, and store documents. The staff also takes advantage of SharePoint’s social networking functionality, and the port encourages employees to maintain My Sites with blogs and wikis to share information about what they’re working on. Finally, the port is in the process of implementing a records center in SharePoint in order to put a legal hold on documents required by Washington state law.
With SharePoint being used as a business-critical system at the organization and approximately 2 terabytes (TB) of data residing in its environment, protecting the port’s data and ensuring the system was efficiently managed were of utmost importance. However, the company ran into a challenge when it came to data recovery. SharePoint’s native backup abilities were not able to meet the company’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for site collections, items, or objects, which was 24 hours. “We needed to restore a full database to retrieve one lost document, and with a collaboration portal nearly one TB in size, this typically took at least two days,” said Paul Jeyasingh, Systems Engineering Manager at Port of Seattle. “We tried several third-party software solutions on the market but found them all to be too tedious to use or simply could not get them to work.”
With the need for swift data recovery to meet organizational RTOs, the port continued to search for solutions.
After encountering AvePoint at a conference, the port administrators learned about DocAve Backup and Restore – part of the DocAve Software Platform – and set up a demo, ultimately leading to the decision to implement the product. DocAve Backup and Restore provides business-aware, comprehensive, service level agreement (SLA)-driven protection of SharePoint environments, addressing the need for a fast, flexible, and intelligent backup solution. “We were quite impressed by how well DocAve was able to backup and recover SharePoint objects, and it was very easy to use,” Jeyasingh said. “During our proof of concept phase, we appreciated the ease of deployment, the intuitive web-based interface, and the helpful technical and sales support we received.”
With DocAve, the port was able to recover SharePoint data well within its RTO. DocAve granularly restores SharePoint content down to the item level, and all restores of missing or corrupted content can be processed in a live SharePoint environment during standard hours of operation without interrupting the flow of business. “With DocAve, we are able to restore content granularly within 30 minutes, and that is a conservative estimate” Jeyasingh said. “This helps us deliver the service our organization requires to maximize productivity.”
Since DocAve features more than 30 fully integrated products for SharePoint governance, compliance, and infrastructure management, the port was able to solve other challenges with the platform as well. With DocAve Administrator, the port could increase operational efficiency by centralizing settings, configurations, and security for robust discovery, search, and management throughout its SharePoint environment. “After employees leave the organization, the process of cleaning up user accounts from all of the different sites where they had permissions was tedious and would take days,” Jeyasingh said. “In order to manage their site collections efficiently, site collection owners and end users need a clear and accurate view of permissions in the environment. DocAve allows us to give that to them by allowing us to find and remove dead accounts in a matter of minutes.”
As the organization continues to utilize DocAve to meet its SharePoint data protection and management objectives, the port is also looking to new ways to maximize its deployment with additional products from the platform such as DocAve Connector, allowing collaboration upon network file shares directly through SharePoint without migration. “Without the need to deploy or install additional agents to implement new products and with the ability to access one centralized console for our SharePoint management needs, DocAve is truly a one stop shop,” Jeyasingh said.
The Port of Seattle plays a key role in bringing international trade, transportation and travel to the Pacific Northwest, and supports industries as diverse as tourism and commercial fishing. The port is also a key builder of road and rail infrastructure, partnering with other agencies to improve freight traffic from Tacoma to Everett.
We were quite impressed by how well DocAve was able to backup and recover SharePoint objects, and it was very easy to use.