Martin Brokers cashes in on back-up swap

London-based broking firm Martin Brokers has saved money and improved the management of critical data by moving to a new online back-up provider.

The firm is on course to save around £63,000 per year in storage costs and has a much more reliable system for dealing with critical data, following its switch to vendor oncore IT.

The firm - which has nearly 400 employees in London and across Europe - backs up around 15,000 emails per day as well as CRM information, brokerage volume reports and market feed data, much retained for compliance reasons.

Scott Martin, IT manager at Martin Brokers, said the broking firm was motivated by price as well as flexibility in its decision to move.

"The cost was the biggest thing. [Our old supplier was] charging us about £7 per GB for storage and we had about 500GB of compressed storage, so if you do the numbers on that on a monthly basis it comes to be a fair bit of money," he told silicon.com.

Martin added that the old product wasn't as flexible as was needed due to the need to install agents on each server and a lack of proactive product support.

The company started to look for alternatives in summer 2008 and started a free one-month trial with oncore IT in October.

Martin said: "We took all our data, backed it up onto USB devices. [oncore IT] took it up to their office, put it onto their storage and then we started trialling some of our key servers on the back-up."

"After a couple of weeks I was just so impressed with the service and what it was delivering over what we already had and also just the major cost reduction, I asked for it to go ahead and we signed the contract in November and we've been live ever since," he added.

According to Martin, oncore IT managed a better compression ratio - around 500GB data was reduced to 300GB when the new system was implemented - which helped the company further lower its costs.

The other major benefit of the new system has been the proactive way in which oncore IT manages the back-up process, according to Martin.

"They can connect to our back-up server here. If a job fails through the night, they'll log-in, have a look at it, resolve the issue, run the back-up again [and] by the time we come in in the morning, everything's backed up," he said.

The data that is backed up in London is also mirrored at oncore IT's facility in Paris.

Back-up speeds are also quicker due to the oncore IT system being entirely IP-based. "Speed was a big thing," Martin added.

The next step for Martin Brokers will be to set up a disaster recovery site in Amsterdam in 2010.