The Challenge: Lacked Robust
Features with Multiple Points of
Failure

Century Savings Bank had been using EVault and onsite NAS devices. Only basic operations were usable under that setup. EVault was used to recover the files. Data and productivity could be lost during downtime, and if the Primary Domain Controller (PDC) went down, the business would be in big trouble. William Estlow, the Network Manager at Century Savings Bank, was aware of the risk. It was something that sometimes kept him up at night

The Solution: A High-Availability
Solution

When William was looking for a replacement for EVault’s online storage archive, he ran into Quorum at a Data Connector conference. Their top requirements were what every business should be ready for – when a server goes down, the location should still be up and running, with everyone doing their jobs and with no files lost. When William learned what Quorum can do, he was impressed and immediately selected Quorum as their data backup and recovery vendor.

The Results: Quorum as “A Hot
Standby of Servers” – Less Stress,
More Protection, and No More Panic

Before implementing Quorum, the only solution was using online archive of files and local NAS storage. After implementing Quorum, Century Savings Bank have an instant 1 to 1 copy of the onsite server ready to take the place of the production server should it fail. “If the production server failed, we can instantly recover on the Quourm box then schedule the bare metal restore to the latest Quorum backup to any server hardware and be back up and running in less than an hour on production hardware,” said William. “It also gives us the ability to have quick file recovery archive if a user happens to delete and need a file restored.”

William recalled this one instance when Quorum really impressed him: “One night while we were looking at some errors on a PDC (Primary Domain Controller) and noticed some disk errors. Nothing CHKDSK and SFC couldn’t fix. As soon as we started the scans, things went south. We lost the primary boot partition and the server was gone. [We] came to find out that the smart raid array had failed and the server was dead. Normally you panic and pray you can rebuild the server and restore all the files before 8 am the next morning. Nope, not with Quorum. Because the bank had just closed for the day, we opted to just recover back to production, and in under 2 hours, we completed a bare metal restore from the local Quorum server and went home and got some sleep. The next morning came and no one even knew the PDC for the entire institution died the night prior.” Now, one of the features that William cannot live without is Quorum’s ability to become their ‘hot standby of servers.’ As William puts it, “I don’t want to have to rebuild a server at 1 AM. Now I login to Quorum, fire up the standby server and life goes on normally. This gives me time to do the repair, not rush with no sleep and make a mistake.” Because of Quorum, William’s job is now less stressful. “IT is a stressful job. You must worry about users, computers, servers, networks, patching, security, etc. To know that at least one of them has a safety net makes my work life so much less stressful. With Quorum, they cover all three. One, server. When server goes down, Quorum is up in minutes and work continues normally. Two, PC. There could be a server failure, and this server could be a DC, you simply fire up Quorum, and DC is back, and the PC’s have a DC to talk to. Three, users. Without a domain controller, user can’t login. With Quorum, users never know a server failure ever happened.” William also felt extremely protected and impressed by Quorum’s ransomware protection. “… to be able to instantly restore a server to full working condition prior to a [ransomware] attack is BIG! If you were ever wondering if there is protection against ransomware, the answer is YES. Just restore the server to a date prior to the attack and DONE! Server, files and sleep SAVED!” It is safe to say that Quorum will be saving him countless hours of sleep.