ABOUT THE COMPANY
Superdrug operates over 700 stores throughout the UK employing 12,000 people and serving over 4.5 million customers each week. With rapidly increasing data backup requirements from 700 desktops and a powerful new intranet for 200 high street stores, Superdrug's Infrastructure Project Manager, Simon Stephenson, knew he would need to review the company's backup and restore policy.

THE REQUIREMENT
Superdrug's rapid development is underpinned by robust IT systems - the high street stores' back office systems and e-commerce are run on AS400s, while administration at the head office is run from 700 desktops in a Microsoft Windows NT environment.

Simon Stephenson is responsible for the smooth running of the desktops and knows how intractable the storage problem can be. "People find it hard to throw documents away and some data, such as financial records now have to be kept for longer periods by law."

He is also responsible for the development of a new corporate Intranet using Microsoft IIS. With the Intranet a few months from rollout and its storage requirement becoming clear in early trials, the requirement for additional, secure backup capacity was clear.

Data retrieval was another problem area. "When documents are stored offsite it could take over two days to get them back - but users want them immediately," says Simon.

Simon decided he had to upgrade Superdrug's tape-based backup system and reviewed the cost of buying more tapes and a new tape loader, with more offsite tape storage. With his team under constant pressure, he was reluctant to see more time spent on routine backup and decided to investigate the VBAK service.

THE VBAK SOLUTION
Simon was immediately attracted by the fully managed VBAK service, as it would relieve his team of time-consuming backup duties.

He was impressed by the expertise of the VBAK technical team and decided to go ahead with a statistical measurement and analysis of his backup requirements. "The analysis showed how many files needed daily backup, how much traffic there is on our existing network and how much the VBAK service would cost," he explains. "It seemed as if the initial investment would be too much for us but when we put in real figures for labour costs, we realised that additional tape-based backup would be more expensive than we expected. It all added up to the same cost as the VBAK implementation," continues Simon.

"The new Intranet was the final push for us. It will not be business-critical at first but it will become a central source of data and communication within Superdrug and we needed to make sure we had assured backup to support it. We realised that in a few months we would have to upgrade a conventional backup system again, with yet more cost."

THE TECHNOLOGY
VBAK is a fully automated solution using a private leased line to backup customer data to a remote Data Centre where it is stored on disk. The software incorporates 56-bit DES encryption to ensure the security and integrity of all data. A Customer Administrator Console is set up at the customer premises for setting backup schedules and carrying out data restores. A VBAK team deliver the fully managed service controlling every aspect of implementation, including training where required.

BUSINESS BENEFITS
"VBAK offered the ideal situation," explains Simon Stephenson. "We just don't have to worry about backup anymore. The VBAK restore is an additional feature which is helpful to us in providing a good data retrieval service for our internal customers."

FINAL WORD
For the Intranet, VBAK gives us powerful, scalable, secure backup and an immediate disaster recovery solution," concludes Simon.