Following an intensive evaluation process, Neckermann Versand AG chooses to employ the backup software PresSTORE from the German based company Archiware. The permanent access to always-current production data is essential for Neckermann's production of promotion materials. This article describes the requirements set upon the backup and arguments the decision for PresSTORE.

Neckermann Versand AG is the third-largest dispatch order house in Germany and fifth largest in Europe. Neckermann's offering ranges from youth fashion and fashion in all sizes over furniture and home textiles to household appliances and entertainment electronics. All the products are offered via catalogue sales, as well as in the www.neckdermann.de Internet portal, which was awarded "The Online Shop of the Year" prize for the second time in a row in 2004. The coordination and planning of the production of marketing materials is in the hands of the in-house marketing department.

The pictures for the entire marketing materials are taken and retouched in the house-own digital photo-studio, in excess of 25,000 photos alone in 2004. For catalogue production, external media service providers are also employed, who lay out the pages by means of Quark XPress. The Helios layout files required in this catalogue production are made available to the staff and the external partners via the Web-based Neckermann production system. The completed catalogue page layouts are also transferred online via browser into a virtual file system of the production system. Neckermann's marketing staff collects, checks, optimizes and arrange the catalogue pages and delivers the catalogue in PDF to print.

To enable shortest possible catalogue and other printed commercials production times, it is essential for Neckermann to have access to its entire production data at all times. To accomplish this, the content of Neckermann's production sever, a Sun Fire 480 R with Helios software and 4TB of online storage, is copied over, i.e. synchronized with a redundant file system each night. Moreover, on this "mirror" server, all the copies of the deleted production data from the previous days are kept in order to have quick access to previous stages of the production. To store the raw photo-studio picture data, a further Sun Fire 280 R with 2TB of online storage is used. Backup is done on an Adic Scalar 1000 tape library with 4x AIT-3 advanced intelligent tape drives.

Responsible for maintaining Neckermann's IT infrastructure is the company Vitras GmbH (see box). Mr. Timo Friesen, Vitras technical manager, was faced mid last year with the task the to bring the backup up-to-date to meet the new and growing system requirements. The backup was realized using Dantz Retrospect at the time. Not only should the 6TB of production and image data be backed up during the weekend, but the Web e-mail, DNS and Proxy-Server should also be considered and included in the new solution. Moreover, it was realized that also a part of the local workstations should also be integrated into the backup. On one hand, the staff e-mails partly contain important information for coordinating production with the partners, on the other, layout data gets sometimes saved on local workstation discs. It was necessary to find a solution that not only supported the Helios file system, but also Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Unix.

Additionally to these basic requirements, the backup speed in particular proved to be one of the critical parameters, since during a full backup, over one million files were included. Retrospect could not cope with these data volumes in the given time frame. The compatibility with the Helios file system further reduced the choice of possible solutions. Legato Networker, which is often applied in Unix environments, does not offer the required compatibility and was ruled out early in the selection process due to its high license costs.

Mr. Thomas Mockenhaupt, CEO Vitras GmbH explains: "Due to the requirement for continuous warranty on the product, it is essential for us to have direct access to the vendor." a further important decision criterion in seeking the right solution. Another aspect was the necessity for an easy and intuitive GUI, which was one of the criteria ES Backup from UGSoft, an often-applied solution with Helios file servers, did not sufficiently meet. A further drawback, according to Mr. Friesen, was that administration of the product requires a special Macintosh program, prohibiting flexible maintenance from any workstation within the company.

When it turned out that PresSTORE only supported Internet Explorer for its Web GUI, which Vitras administrators could not use since Linux workstations are employed, Archiware promptly brought out an additional support for Mozilla in its next release. "We were pleasantly surprised by Archiware's quick response and the professional competence of Archiware's personnel", Mr. Friesen summarizes his impressions about co-operating with Archiware. "We received answers to our e-mail questions within hours of posting. Program patches were available within days."

The first step for Mr. Friesen and his collaborators was to instantiate a backup of the three Helios production servers by means of PresSTORE. For this purpose, a separate Linux machine was dedicated as a PresSTORE server. On each of the Helios servers, a PresSTORE client was installed. The client conveys the information about the Helios volumes and configuration to the server. The production data mirrored on the file server were excluded from the backup, but the retained copies of the deleted files on the same RAID were not. The connection between the PresSTORE clients and the server is a gigabit copper-based Ethernet, whereas the Adic library uses a fiber-optic gigabit Ethernet connection to the server.

PresSTORE from the German based Archiware immediately convinced the Vitras staff for several equally important reasons. The software is designed for a diversified platform environment with large volumes of data in mind. By supporting a multiplicity of data formats, it can handle Unix, Helios and also Macintosh and Windows files in parallel during the same backup session. Configuring PresSTORE is intuitive and can be done from any workstation via a Browser-based interface. This way, if required in case of an emergency, the administrator can remotely intervene and recover data. The parallel data streaming technology, which enables saving data from multiple sources in parallel to multiple media, allows PresSTORE backup throughputs in excess of 100GB/hour. The direct contact with and support from the vendor was a matter of fact from the onset. Mr. Josef Doods, Archiware CEO presented PresSTORE to Vitras in person.

The backup plan runs a full backup every weekend. It starts at 20:00 hours on Friday evening and ends after approximately 56 hours around Sunday noon. During the week, incremental backups actualize the backup state, whereby around 100GB of data is transferred each night. At the end of the week, a new backup pool is employed, so that the entire week of data is located on one set of tapes. After seamlessly configuring the daily backup, an equally easy configuration of the archive followed. Only data that is not used in catalogues and advertisements for a longer period of time gets archived. It occasionally occurs, never the less, that images from the archive need to be integrated into the current production. As a matter of fact, the marketing department staff can accomplish this task autonomously, aided thereby in their search for the right data with the PresSTORE's gallery function. When archiving, PresSTORE saves a preview of each image file together with its entry in the index. This visual presentation enables even speedier location of the data.

"We are entirely convinced of the product!" Mr. Friesen and Mr. Mockenhaupt confidently conclude after a nine-month introductory phase. The next steps will be to incorporate the home and desktop directories of the 200 Mac OS X workstations of Neckermann's marketing department into the backup. One is still a bit skeptical to the yet to be instantiated synchronization of the production data to the mirror RAID, which will also be realized by means of the PresSTORE synchronize module. "If this really works, then we will always maintain a complete mirror in real-time. This enables us to considerably increase the reliability of our production environment," Mr. Friesen explains the great advantage that this option in his opinion offers. With the vendor's support, Vitras will take on this challenge too.

"a solution that delivers exactly what the customer needs and enables them to easily manage the backup and archive process without involving high levels of technical support"

Screenshot examples

PresSTORE shows in detail the contents of backup folders according to the file system. A normal user can readily find his data too.

When searching in the archive, the gallery function assists the speedy location of the sought file.

A list of all the configured media pools.

PresSTORE optionally sends an e-mail with a summary of the completed job to the administrator.

Generating a backup plan