Since its founding in 2007, Fujifilm India, with its India headquarters in Gurgaon, has been growing at a rapid pace. The wholly-owned subsidiary of global giant Fujifilm Holdings Corporation, the company operates in a broad spectrum of imaging industries, and aims to achieve double-digit growth every year.
But till recently, Anil Kumar, Chief IT Manager at Fujifilm India – who’s otherwise known as a cool and suave man among friends and colleagues – was spending sleepless nights. In a recent chat with one of his dear friends and team mates over tea, he finally revealed it was data that was lately keeping him awake all night.
The dilemma with data backup
World over, FUJIFILM is the pioneer in imaging technology with 80 years of experience. Even when its close competitors started losing their sheen in the industry, the Tokyo-based multi-national company, with the help of advanced technologies, continued to charm its customers with a wide range of solutions in Digital camera, Photo imaging, medical products, graphic arts, life science systems, motion picture films, recording media and industrial products.
FUJIFILM has always paid particular attention to the rapidly-growing Indian economy. As a firm believer in sophistication, the company continues to work hard to provide the Indian consumer the best products and services. From the supply chain and finance to distribution and import or export operations, Fujifilm’s India counterpart too relies on highly-available data to ensure it can deliver an excellent customer experience. It is currently present in 20 locations across India, including its head office, four branches and 14 warehouses.
India, being an important part of the company’s global ecosystem, it needed to quickly come up with a strategy to safeguard its data, as Kumar said, “With a significant volume of business and customer data to protect, Fujifilm India needed a robust and reliable backup and recovery solution to safeguard business continuity.”
“We have a significant volume of data that underpins a whole variety of business operations. If any of it was lost, our employees, customers and business operations could be severely disrupted,” he said.
The moment he anticipated an incident where a crashed user device was not able to be recovered, it gave him a chill down his spine. It was a matter of brand reputation – that of retaining a strong brand image to its hundreds of customers and partners.
Kumar realized the urgency to create a more robust, resilient backup and disaster recovery system to keep these problems at bay.
Going for a robust backup system
After having a thorough discussion with the senior management, Kumar and his team decided to look for a robust and reliable data backup and recovery solution to protect user and application data.
Soon, Fujifilm India undertook a thorough evaluation of the products on the market, and after a proof of concept exercise, deployed Arcserve UDP Appliance in July 2018, from the house of Arcserve, a provider of data protection, replication and recovery solutions.
“We tested Arcserve very vigorously before we implemented the solution and were impressed by how easy it was to use. Simplicity was a key factor in our decision – we didn’t want a solution that was complex or time-consuming to use,” said Kumar.
In just a few days, Arcserve Support Services helped the company implement the appliance in Fujifilm India’s data center and configured it to start backing up company data.
Today, it protects around six terabytes of data. Data is ranked according to how critical it is and scheduled backups are taken to ensure the most appropriate level of protection, with incremental backups running daily and taking only five minutes to complete. Data is de-duplicated at a rate of approximately 80% and stored on the appliance.
In total, 25 servers are protected, including ERP, SQL and SAP servers, VMware technology, Oracle databases, the company’s business intelligence tool, and user data including Microsoft Office files and PDFs.
“With Arcserve, we can recover data very quickly and spin up a virtual environment if a server goes down,” Kumar said, adding that “Recently, a 500 gigabyte server went down and we could get it back up and running in less than three hours.”
Eliminating the risk of data loss
Kumar believes, with Arcserve UDP Appliance, Fujifilm India has now mitigated the risk of any data loss impacting business continuity. The solution also enables the company to: increase productivity, enhance its overall performance and in turn safeguard its reputation.
“I have total confidence that the Arcserve UDP Appliance is protecting our business data, and that’s earned the IT department the respect of our colleagues,” said Kumar.
“We’re looking to expand our use of Arcserve products in the future and know that with better disaster recovery and data protection, we can become a more powerful company as we grow,” concluded a relaxed Kumar.
