October 28, 2008 Original pdf (139 Kb)
Wesdome Protects Data at Two Canadian Gold Mines The heart of Toronto, Ontario-based Wesdome Gold Mine Ltd.'s corporate activity really is made of gold. The company, formed in 1987, takes advantage of two gold deposits situated in the Canadian Shield. Spread over two mining sites in Ontario and Quebec, Wesdome reached a milestone in 2008, having poured one million ounces since the company opened. The total mining potential for these properties remains unknown but both mines remain open at depth and the company continues to find more gold year after year.
Gold is often found in sparsely populated areas, and the company's Eagle River mine (shown in photo) is no exception. An hour and a half outside of Wawa, Ontario, and accessed by a logging road, a Dell Windows 2003 R2 server sits in the mine office, accessed by 20 workstations and sharing a T1 Internet feed with a nearby gold milling operation and camp area. Wesdome recently undertook a major initiative to develop a comprehensive preventative program for protecting the company's data and its computing infrastructure. Marc Potvin, the company's IT strategist, is based 800 kilometres away from Eagle River at the company's Kiena mining site in Val d'Or, Québec. Potvin came on board and shortly thereafter sought to enhance the company's ability to respond to data loss. His first step was to develop a better way to back up the data, followed by a move to fortify the company's servers to provide a more robust IT infrastructure. Remote backup of a remote site not an option. Potvin began by finding way to better protect data at Eagle River. He couldn't continue to use the site's tape backup system and its Symantec Backup Exec software. "The existing tape backup system required verification of the tape backup. Also, I could not be certain that office personnel would make the required daily media change," he said. Moreover, the Eagle River site's T1 link lacked the bandwidth to remotely back up data to the Kiena office in a timely way. Potvin decided that Wesdome needed to take data protection to a new level by specifying a more self-sufficient disk-based system at Eagle River site. Potvin didn't have to reach far to secure a better way to manage the situation. He was already a devoted user of the Acronis True Image Home product.
Potvin didn't have to reach far to secure a better way to manage the situation. He was already a devoted user of the Acronis True Image Home PC product and this inspired him to consider the company's server-and workstation-based offerings. "I have been really pleased with the home product, especially its image-based restore function. I figured that if Acronis works so well for my home PC, I had to wonder what it could do for a Dell server over in Ontario." Eagle River's distant location provided Wesdome with an excellent reason for going with Acronis: it would eliminate the mine's dependence on tapes for storing backups. He purchased an Acronis True Image (ATI) server license and workstation licenses, and ordered a two-terabyte disk-based Buffalo Technologies Terastation II running RAID 5 to store all the backups. "With this combination I was able to guarantee a secure backup of Eagle River," Potvin said. Once the ATI software was installed early in 2008, he found he had a reliable, easily managed backup mechanism that didn't require regular intervention.
 Once the ATI software was installed early in 2008, he found he had a reliable, easily-managed backup mechanism that didn't require regular intervention. Once an initial full backup was completed, all subsequent incremental daily backups would present no danger of overwhelming the data link. "I now receive daily emails confirming that the backup is being done. I can easily confirm that it is successful by going into volumes, opening them and testing to make sure they are valid," Potvin explains. "Now, if we have any issues I can direct someone on site to press the F11 key or boot from the recovery CD, and guide that person through the recovery process."
Applying the Acronis model closer to home. Having solved the problem of how to back up Eagle River, Potvin decided to apply the same model to the Kiena Mine site where he is based. There, three Windows 2003 servers (an HP ML 350 main server and two ML 330 servers) and 60 Windows-based workstations are used to run the company's accounting operations and store business-critical mining data. At Kiena, Potvin had been using Symantec Backup Exec software coupled with an HP Ultrium 960 tape drive having an 800 GB capacity, but he was eager to move away from tape to a disk-based product. "I never really had a good experience with cassettes. Although I could tell I had a backup, I was always afraid to use the restore function because I didn't feel confident of a quick recovery with tape." This concern was proved correct each of the few times Potvin had to carry out a tape restore. For instance, in order to retrieve an older version of a file from a backup two weeks prior, he would have to find the cassette, roll the tape and get the file. It was a long process. Wesdome made a decision to replace
Backup Exec with Acronis ATI server software
Based on the successful Acronis installation at Eagle River, Potvin made a decision to replace Backup Exec with Acronis True Image (ATI) Server software. At the same time it replaced its tape drive with another two-terabyte Terastation II running RAID 5. The resulting system shortens the backup windows considerably for the accounting and data servers and no longer requires personnel to make tape cassette changes. But more important are the rapid restore times offered by a hard disk-based backup and recovery product. Wesdome can count on the need to recover files three or four times a year, so the peace of mind that comes from recovering lost files in minutes rather than hours easily justifies the investment in Acronis software. Wesdome can now archive many more weeks of backups than the tape-based system it replaces. In fact, working with tapes had made it unwieldy to keep many weeks' worth of tape cassettes before they had to be overwritten. When an accounting server recently crashed it was a simple matter to roll back to an earlier backup and restore the server. But since server failures are rare, the primary Acronis benefits to Wesdome comes from ATI's incremental backups, which archive daily changes efficiently, and from a newfound ability to recover a given file or subfolder quickly. Acronis builds confidence. Acronis True Image has given Wesdome a new confidence in the security of its data and its servers. "It comes down to this one thing," Potvin says. "I feel more comfortable and confident with this backup system." Moreover, he finds the user interface to be particularly easy to use. "I'm an old school guy. With the Acronis GUI, I feel comfortable going through the various steps because I don't have to guess about what I am doing, and I know that until I press "OK," I'm sure I haven't committed to a task." No worry about data. If the company hadn't chosen Acronis, nothing would have changed, according to Potvin. On his desk sit 20 cassettes that are no longer used, and he has no intention of returning to them. "With the Acronis image-based products in place, I don't worry about the safety of company data at all. Each server is backed up to a remote NAS. On the main server I can go back to any point within the last three months and as far as five months on the accounting server." Having guaranteed the security of its data, Wesdome will spend the next year employing Acronis Universal Restore software to enhance the physical integrity of its servers, specifying a second server to eliminate the company's dependence on the single server at Eagle River. The company also plans to add another server in Kiena that is large enough to take over in the event of an accounting server failure. "True confidence" in True Image. Acronis will continue to play a central role in the company's data management strategy. "Acronis helped me put a contingency plan in place," Potvin says. I don't worry about it at all. I have true confidence in data that's being backed up and great confidence in our ability to recover a server or single file."
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