Maritime Paper Products
keeps data safe without
productivity interruption
Customer profile
We’re Packaging Innovation.
Company Maritime Paper
Products Ltd.
Industry
Manufacturing and Logistics
Country
Canada
Employees 140
Web site maritimepaper.com
Challenge
Maritime Paper Products needed
cost-effective disaster recovery
software for both physical and
virtual machines.
Solution
The company implemented the
Dell™ AppAssure award-winning
backup and disaster recovery solution.
Benefits
• 693% ROI in two months
• 95% savings in storage space
• Minutes to recover lost file
versus 24 hours with Symantec
Backup Exec
“We know that if we need to restore a
single file, email or server, it can be done
quickly and without any hassle. The fact
that our data is safe and being continually
backed up is the single biggest factor with
Dell AppAssure.”
Rob MacCara, System Administrator, Maritime Paper Products Ltd.
Application areas
• Disaster Recovery
• Virtualization
On a daily basis, most people don’t spend much time thinking
about boxes—especially corrugated boxes used for shipping.
One doesn’t contemplate the beer boxes, vegetable boxes and
seafood boxes among others that hold the goods being shipped
around the world from ports every hour of every day. We rarely
think about the process of manufacturing the boxes, preparing
the boxes and meeting box standards of customers from all
around the world. That is, unless you’re one of the hundreds of
employees of Maritime Paper Products Ltd. (MPP), located in
Nova Scotia, Canada, who think about boxes every single day.
“In the old days, if
a lost file needed
recovering, the
tape would have
to be brought
back on-site the
next day. At best,
it was easily a 24hour turnaround,
as opposed to the
mere minutes to
recover with Dell
AppAssure.”
Rob MacCara,
System Administrator,
Maritime Paper Products Ltd.
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“We serve the local region, overseas, the
Caribbean and the U.S. markets,” says
Rob MacCara, system administrator at
MPP. “We have four locations all centrally
managed from our main plant in Nova
Scotia. We’ve a long-term, very loyal
work force, with more than 140 past and
present employees that have been with
us for more than 25 years. MPP is a great
place to work!”
removable disks,” explains MacCara.
“When we had major failures, it meant
building everything from scratch,
updating the OS and installing software
and then crossing our fingers as we
restored from disk and tape.” Sometimes
it would take MPP’s IT staff over 24
hours just to recover one file. If a SQL
server failed, the entire plant would be
shut down.
MPP’s success throughout the years
has been dependent not only on
its committed staff, but also on the
forward-thinking automation and
technology that supports the team’s
work. With modern corrugating and
converting machines creating over
20,000 boxes an hour, networked
locations throughout the Atlantic
Provinces, critical applications running
on Microsoft SQL Server and a virtual
environment for disaster recovery (DR),
MPP depends on both its people
and its superior technology to get its
work done.
As the costs for an increasinglyunworkable process kept rising, so did
the “frustration meter,” as MacCara calls
it. “We knew we were not safely backed
up, and in the event of a catastrophe, we
would be in trouble,” he explains. “This
had been growing over the years so that
by the time we went with virtualization,
our existing backup software wasn’t up
to the task. We’d either have to pay for
an expensive upgrade, or have greatly
reduced backup capability. It all came to
Technology at work
Which is why MacCara switched
from Symantec Backup Exec™ to
Dell AppAssure.
Software
Dialing down the “frustration meter”
with Dell AppAssure
“Prior to Dell AppAssure, our backup
procedure involved Backup Exec,
rotating tapes and full backups to
Microsoft® SQL Server®
BlackBerry® Enterprise Server
Dell™ AppAssure
VMware®
a head that we couldn’t ignore any more.
That’s when we found Dell AppAssure,
and it’s been like night and day.” MPP’s
before and after experience has been
dramatic in terms of both return on
investment (ROI) and advanced backup
and recovery features.
95% savings in storage space
Right off the bat, MacCara knew MPP
was in a different world with AppAssure.
The company has seen over 300
gigabytes of data reduced to just 15
gigabytes—a 95 percent storage space
savings. “Of course, it’s difficult to
compare storage savings from our old
method to Dell AppAssure, as we were
never able to back up entire servers—
data only,” notes MacCara. “We now are
backing up a total of 10 servers ranging
from Microsoft SQL Server, BlackBerry
Enterprise Server, terminal servers,
domain controllers, file and application
servers, and of course our Dell
AppAssure servers, easily and quickly.”
“In the old days, if a lost file needed
recovering, the tape would have to
be brought back on-site the next day,”
explains MacCara. “We would try to
recover the file from the tape, and then
copy it back to the user’s folder. At best,
it was easily a 24-hour turnaround, as
opposed to the mere minutes to recover
with Dell AppAssure. This saves us staff
time. Recently our primary domain
controller’s RAID backplane failed,
resulting in a major crash. In less than
an hour—including troubleshooting the
server—the domain controller was up
and running as a virtual machine. The
costs and staff time would have been
much higher if we had to do this without
Dell AppAssure. You’re talking allnighters, panic, updating management
and money.”
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One of the key requirements that MPP
had as they sought out an advanced
backup and disaster recovery solution
was the ability to back up to both virtual
and physical servers, and then be able
to restore either back to physical or to
a VMware-based virtual machine. “Our
disaster recovery project was already
in the early planning stages,” explains
MacCara, “and our solution would
be playing an important role (once
implemented) by replicating to
the DR site. Dell AppAssure was the
only one that was able to fit into our
mixed environment and handle all
our requirements.”
DR testing without affecting
company productivity
At present, MPP has two virtual
AppAssure servers—the main one is
backing up two physical servers and
eight virtual servers. A secondary backup
server is in the company’s disaster
recovery site, and it receives and stores
the replicated server data. MPP looks
to the sophisticated backup and
disaster recovery features of AppAssure
to meet their DR planning needs.
With push button failover virtual
machines, if MPP’s database server
goes down, MacCara can spin it back
up, test and make sure there isn’t any
damage. MacCara can use physicalto-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual
(V2V) snapshot conversions, and export
to virtual machines for migrations and
testing. MPP’s SQL server includes
billing, invoicing, inventory, diagrams/
plans, planning, shipping modules and
software for the corrugators. MacCara
exports snaps, to keep the data safe.
With push button disaster recovery
testing, MPP is able to do DR testing
without affecting the company’s
“Recently our
primary domain
controller’s RAID
backplane failed,
resulting in a major
crash. In less than
an hour—including
troubleshooting
the server—the
domain controller
was up and
running as a virtual
machine. The
costs and staff
time would have
been much higher
if we had to do
this without Dell
AppAssure.”
Rob MacCara,
System Administrator,
Maritime Paper Products Ltd.
productivity. MPP’s servers (including
all the data and emails) are being
completely backed up with plenty
of recovery points, as well as
being replicated.
“We are in the final stages of
implementing our DR infrastructure,
which is 100 percent virtual,” says
MacCara. “Our off-site DR plan means
that if it happens in Dartmouth, we can
still keep the other plants running.”
Peace of mind with Dell AppAssure
is priceless
And up and running is the key in the box
manufacturing world. Depending on
the season, a server failure could mean
a plant shutdown, work stoppages and
remote plant closures. “If a disaster were
to happen in the middle of summer
when our beer and vegetable boxes are
made around the clock,” says MacCara,
“this would have a huge impact. We
run 24x7 and three shifts during that
time, so the peace of mind that Dell
AppAssure gives us for the replicated
servers is priceless.”
In addition, MacCara is seeing other
savings across the board, including
$28,000 in software and hardware
costs, as well as a 693 percent ROI in
two months.
MPP boxes couldn’t be in better hands
“We know that if we need to restore
a single file, email or server, it can be
done quickly and without any hassle.
The fact that our data is safe and being
continually backed up is the single
biggest factor with Dell AppAssure,”
explains MacCara. “I’m actively involved
in Spiceworks and other technology
forums, and I tell people that I couldn’t
be happier with how Dell AppAssure
has made my job simpler.”
View all Dell case studies at dell.com/casestudies
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© September 2012. Microsoft and SQL Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the
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Reference number 10011534