TSG implements Data Backup and Data Storage for Liverpool Football Club
The customer
Liverpool Football Club plays in the Premier League. Liverpool has played at Anfield since the clubs foundation in 1892. They are one of England’s most successful football clubs - ranked 3rd in Europe and 6th in the world with the most international titles won.
Liverpool FC needed to protect its data to ensure that if lost, the data could be quickly restored so that the daily running of the club would not be impacted.
‘Our IT staff are now freed up to concentrate on developing new technologies to increase the productivity of the business. With the Backup Technology service we are now protecting all our emails as well as the data from our laptop users, when they are on the move’
The customer objectives
Liverpool FC were looking to accelerate data backup, prevent data loss, ensure business continuation and achieve cost efficiencies. They were previously using legacy tape-based backup and disaster recovery (DR). Switching to disk-to-disk from tape was essential for Liverpool FC to increase the speed of the backup and recovery, as well as to guarantee a 100% success rate in retrieving lost data. With tape backup, every time a backup of the ticketing system was carried out, the entire system had to be closed down, limiting backups to once a day only.
The TSG Solution
Backup Technology is among a number of IT Support services from TSG, and provides a Backup and Recovery Service to secure all data from the stadium, training grounds and online and shop sales. The backup technology carries out a data backup for Liverpool FC on an hourly basis without interruptions to the system, even during peak periods. The backup also includes data generated by the online ticketing information and the club shop (where point-of-sale data is generated), all emails from every office location, as well as desktops and laptops of key members of staff.
Ken Webster, IT Manager of Liverpool FC, comments: ‘The Backup Technology online service has eliminated the ongoing hidden costs and wasted man hours we were experiencing with tape backup, such as buying new tapes, switching tapes, and transferring tapes to and from the storage depot.’ Ashley Harding, Network Manager of Liverpool FC, adds: ‘Should disaster strike, with Backup Technology we know we can retrieve any lost data within minutes rather than days and with encryption of data in-flight and at-rest, stolen data cannot be read. The bare metal restore solution means that even if our entire technology systems go down and we lose equipment, we can be up and running again within a single day.’
The benefits of Data Backup to Liverpool Football Club
All of Backup Technology’s solutions are fully agentless. To protect an entire organisation’s data, only one piece of software running on one device across the network is needed. The software provides grid-based performance and capacity scaling for virtually unlimited data growth, allowing the software to support any backup load and multiple platforms and operating systems, without the need to install and configure separate clients.
A bare metal restore ensures the minimum downtime and disruption to a business. Users can restore the complete system, including data, profiles, registry & system state, programs & service pack files from Local Storage.
Data Storage
The Local Storage module can help address disaster recovery requirements by saving a copy of the latest version of files at a local storage location. If a restore is needed, the file can be quickly restored from the local environment, at LAN speed, without connecting through the online data vault.
Hot Database & Open File Backup: Backups of SQL & Access databases can be done “Hot” whilst running, allowing customers to schedule data backups throughout the day without disrupting users. Open files can also be dealt with, so the typical Word and Excel documents can be backed up even whilst users are working on them, along with other common applications. Continuous Data Protection continuously monitors and stores any changes to files in real time and preserves copies of all previous versions of the file or object, so that the user can restore data to the point just before a data corruption took place.