The firm, famous for its goods carrying the Radley dog logo, has deployed FalconStor's Continuous Data Protector (CDP) to provide both disaster recovery (DR) and backup services.
The company's primary aim was to replicate information from its data centre in London to a remote warehouse location that also serves as its DR site.
Radley + Co's London infrastructure is almost entirely virtualised on VMware ESX Server, and the firm deployed a FalconStor DiskSafe agent on each virtualised server. The DiskSafe agent synchronises data back to a FalconStor CDP appliance which replicates it to the DR site over a leased line.
Snapshots are taken every three hours, enabling data roll-back to up to a week before any disaster occurred or was discovered.
The company realised that the same FalconStor solution could also meet its backup requirements.
"At one time we had a sizeable window available in which to do our backups," said Francis Rodrigues, IT support manager at Radley + Co. "However, once the business expanded into the US, systems were put to use for far longer periods of time, reducing the backup window to the point where it was almost non-existent."
Rodrigues said the firm realised it could use the snapshots generated by FalconStor CDP to solve the backup problem, by employing FalconStor HyperTrac Backup Accelerator technology to archive data onto tape.
Previously, the company's DR provisioning consisted primarily of backing up to tape, with a strategy of restoring from tape and restarting operations as well as possible. The firm said scenario testing showed that recovery was time-consuming and required the involvement of expensive consultants. It could also involve a loss of operations and data.