Pret sinks teeth into storage

The Pret A Manger brand is a familiar name on many UK streets. The firm has 125 stores offering coffee, other hot and cold drinks, and a range of fresh salads and sandwiches to customers wanting anything from breakfast, lunch or just a coffee break at almost any time of day.

As the company and its number of stores has grown, the amount of data has also increased, prompting the firm to re-examine its data management and protection processes.

At its headquarters Pret has 25 Microsoft 2000 servers, each storing and managing about 500GB of information. Each Prêt store has a dedicated point-to-point line connecting it to headquarters and the servers.

Pret’s data growth created three primary IT objectives related to backup and recovery:

* Nightly backup required improvement as backup windows were being encroached by the growing data volumes – leading to some data not being backed up each night.

* Non-sales data stored remotely at individual stores needed to be stored and backed up centrally to prevent this data being lost.

*z And disaster recovery processes had to be implemented by having backups electronically sent to a second co-location facility.

Recognising that replication software is expensive and bandwidth-intensive, Pret’s IT staff, led by head of IT Mike Hicks, wanted to explore other options.

The team was satisfied with how sales and electronic point of sale (ePos) data was being backed up. But human resource information, email and some sales data held at each Pret outlet was a concern.

As part of its disaster recovery initiative, Pret wanted to make sure that this important information, which included staff rotas, contact information and local documents, would be backed up. With this data residing locally, an in-store hardware failure could result in data loss, significantly harming a store’s ability to function.

‘It’s not unusual to experience these types of failures since hardware is often given something of a rough ride in a retail environment,’ says Hicks. ‘We needed to ensure that local data was also backed up centrally so if remote hardware failure occurred, a store could quickly get back all the data important to the smooth running of the business.’

After evaluating other backup and recovery software, Pret selected EVault InfoStage online backup software and worked with storage specialist TriSys on the implementation.

‘InfoStage works very well with our current infrastructure, whereas the other solutions we looked at would require a local area network upgrade to work effectively, which was significant extra investment we felt wasn’t necessary at this time for Pret’s IT requirements,’ says Hicks.

Following the installation and training period, EVault InfoStage delivered the centralisation of backup of Pret’s stores as well as being able to easily backup to a second site to deliver disaster recovery without incurring additional complexity and cost.

Servers in New York and Hong Kong – where the company has 10 and six stores respectively – are also backed up to the London headquarters via a virtual private network using InfoStage, providing a single, global backup strategy.

‘EVault enabled us to use our existing infrastructure to get data offsite quickly to the co-location site without an elaborate staging process. Online backup is much faster and we have been able to eliminate the time spent previously on tape management and minimise the administrative errors inherent in this process,’ says Hicks.

Each night, InfoStage streamlines processes by providing backups from the Windows 2000 servers to storage arrays at Pret’s headquarters and the co-location site simultaneously so that both exactly reflect the other – critical in the event of a restoration of data being required.

The automated nature of online backup means that management of backup and restore can be started in just a few seconds. This was in stark contrast to Hicks’ previous experience of having to locate and mount tapes, then search for the data and hope the integrity of the media was good enough to deliver the required data.

‘The project has significantly simplified our data management process. Backup of data from London, New York, Hong Kong and all our UK stores happens seamlessly to our London headquarters and our co-location facilities,’ says Hicks.

With the new system in place, the next stage of the process will see Pret installing EVault software agents to back up any locally stored, back-office data held on desktops or laptops.

Further reading:

Sandwich chain overhauls storage