Case study: Tefco calls for backup

Look left, look right, look left again – for many years David Pandel took extra care crossing the road on his way home from work, knowing the only backup of his engineering firm’s irreplaceable data archive was saved on a removable drive in his bag.

The mining boom has been good to Gosford-based Tefco, a small, privately owned Australian engineering firm with 50 staff that has designed and manufactured engineering components for more than 16 years. Chief among the components manufactured by Tefco are the huge conveyer belt pulleys used to haul minerals – monsters that can weigh up to 17 tonnes and are machined to ultra fine tolerances.

Like many companies, Tefco’s most important asset is its intellectual property – which is why Pandel, the general manager, cobbled together his backup regime. It relied on someone remembering each week to backup each desktop computer over the network to a removable hard drive attached to Pandel’s computer. Should fire, theft or equipment failure strike the company, all hopes were resting on the hard drive bouncing around in Pandel’s bag.

Critical to Tefco are the complex drawings and quality documentation which must be safely stored. It has more than 2500 complex manual drawings which cannot be replaced, as well as nearly 3000 CAD drawings.

“Each of the 120 or so pulleys we manufacture each month require at least 50 printed pages of reports on their manufacture and compliance to Australian and International standards,” Pandel said.

“We also collect data from our industrial oven and seven computer-controlled milling machines. Losing this data would probably spell the end of our business.”

As is quite common within organisations that aren’t of the size to warrant their own internal IT department, Pandel also found himself de facto IT manager – putting the company at even greater risk should Pandel and his removable hard drive meet a sticky end in traffic.

Such stories often end badly. It usually takes the pain of a disaster to force companies such as Tefco to put a better back up system in place. Rather than wait for disaster to strike, Pandel acted to avert what he calls “the big red bus” scenario.

“What would have happened if I’d have walked out the door and been hit by a big red bus?” he asked.

“I had the only backup copy of our data. I was the only one who knew how a lot of our systems worked. It was a big risk for the company, which is why the managing director and I agreed that something needed to be done.”

After comparing several quotes, Tefco opted for a solution from Tek Nique, a Sydney-based IT and disaster recovery provider specialising in the industrial and mining sectors. Tek Nique recommended Tefco opt for a central, enterprise class Adaptec Snap Server 4200 for storing important files, rather than keeping them spread across the company’s various desktop computers. The Snap Server runs on Linux and offers around 500 GB of storage courtesy of four 250 GB hard drives in a RAID5 configuration – offering redundancy so no data is lost if one drive fails. The hard drives are hot-swappable, meaning a failed drive can be replaced without having to shut down the server.

The Snap Server 4200 is a rack-mounted design and Smith sectioned off a corner of Tefco’s office to build a server room, protecting it and Tefco’s other important computing equipment from dust generated by the engineering workshop.

While the Snap Server 4200 is often used as a backup device, Tefco is using it as a primary data store. Each day the data on the Snap Server 4200 is backed up to tape using a Sony AIT-2 turbo tape drive. The process uses the Robocopy folder synchronisation software built into Microsoft Windows, which uses volume shadow copy so even open files are copied to the tape. The tape is then stored offsite to protect against fire and theft.

As a extra level of protection, Pandel still keeps a copy of the data on a Maxtor portable drive in his bag.

After many years of organic growth without centralised planning, Tefco had gathered a hotch potch of IT equipment. While introducing the new backup regime, the company took the opportunity to completely overhaul its IT infrastructure. The building’s networking infrastructure was upgraded – adding patch points to the wall rather than snaking cables across the floor or through the ceiling. The new cabling and switches provide the fast and reliable connections required for staff to access files on the Snap Server rather than the hard drive in the computer on their desk. Tefco also deployed two ASUS AP1600 rack-mounted servers, each with dual Xeon 2.6GHz processors and 4GB of RAM, for hosting the company’s website, email and accounting package.

The system also the Snapgear firewall routers in conjunction with Microsoft’s ISA software firewall. As well as protecting against external threats, ISA allows Tefco to restrict staff Internet access either by user account, computer name or by schedule.

Tek Nique’s Randolph Smith said Tefco’s decision to implement a proper backup regime built around the Snap Server 4200 probably saved the company from disaster. It’s gradually become more common for organisations such as Tefco to seek help before its too late, he said.

“I am finding that a lot more people are a lot more knowledgeable of the risks. But there are still a lot of people that you really do have to sit down are really run through and explain the whole thing,” Smith said.

“Unfortunately most of my work is still disaster recover rather the disaster prevention. Once people have had a disaster it’s easy to convince people of the merits of a good backup system because you’re preaching to the choir. Experience is a great teacher, especially a bad experience such as losing everything.”

“My aim is to bring an enterprise level of service and of hardware into companies such as Tefco. It strives to have control of everything. It wants control of its manufacturing process, they want control of their welding process and I think it’s actually quite good to be able to have control of your back-up system and your mail server as well. It also now has a disaster recovery plan should the company not be able to access their building for any reason. As well as offsite data, it also has redundant offsite laptops so they can keep working elsewhere.”

To protect the equipment in Tefco’s new server room, Smith added a power filter and an APC 1500 R3U uninterruptible power supply to keep everything up an running if the power fluctuates.

“Being a manufacturing shop, there is a lot of welding that goes on, so we tend to see a bit of fluctuation of power. The other problem is being located in Gosford, which doesn’t have the best history in power maintenance.”

“The UPS is designed to run for about 15 minutes if the power goes. While this is enough to get you through a brown out or a short blackout it’s only connected up to the servers, not the desktop computers.”

The combined system provided by Tek Nique provides Tefco with a secure foundation on which to further expand the business, said Tefco’s Pandel.

“We said to Tek Nique if you come back to us in three years time and say we’ve outgrown it, we will kill you. This new system was built for the future. We gave him an idea of the things that we’d want to be able to do and how far we would want to expand. With the Snap Server and the other new features, we’re ready for anything.”