Introduction:
James Ennis founded Ennis Fabrics in 1972 knowing that there was a better way to service customers in the textiles and supplies industry. He knew there was a better way to provide customers with what they needed when they needed it. Today, Ennis Fabrics have over 9,000 products that are distributed throughout North America and globally from the company’s extensive, full-service distribution centers in Toronto, Vancouver, and Indianapolis. Ennis Fabrics’ fourth distribution center is a wholly-owned 40,000 ft2 quality control and consolidation warehouse in Ningbo China. Given the extent of operations, and a workforce of close to 200 employees, the challenge was finding the perfect backup/disaster recovery (DR) fit.
Moving to Stage2Data:
The company has a local data center at their headquarters in Edmonton which comprises 75 virtual servers (including email, distribution, shipping, accounting and more) 26 of which required failover and recovery in less than 4 hours. Moreover, they required daily off-site backups which would run every night. As Mubashar Ahmed, Information Systems Manager at Ennis Fabrics explains:
“I regularly have to restore data from the backups. The last set I had to restore comprised 1.8 terabytes of data from the Stage2Data data center to my VMware environment – which completed in under 2 hours! Likewise, the failover testing showed real character, and persistence, which was the result of outstanding teamwork and flexibility.”
The team at Stage2Data worked with Ennis Fabrics to design a cost-effective custom solution that would fit their business requirements and budget. Where any challenges arose, they investigated and either came back with answers or made more suggestions and ultimately recommended using a combination of Zerto and Veeam. Since January 2020, Stage2Data has started implementing and rolling out the new solution around the company’s schedule so as to not disrupt the day-to-day operations.
