Center Parcs
Nasstar overhauls backup technology to future-proof leisure business
Center Parcs is a multi-award-winning market leader in the UK short breaks industry, dedicated to delivering a memorable experience and first-class service for every guest for over 30 years. Its five villages are set in approximately 400 acres of stunning, natural English woodland, offering more than 200 indoor and outdoor activities across its sites.
Services
Cloud Services
Cloud Backup
The Brief
Center Parcs is continually growing and evolving as a business. Its existing Arcserve Tape Backup solution was no longer sufficient for its large dataset, as well as being increasingly expensive, time-consuming to restore from and inadequate for the future needs of the business.
The business required a scalable and robust solution that would remove reliance on tape backup and provide flexibility for future growth. As an existing customer, Center Parcs trusted Nasstar to manage its IT infrastructure, as well as recommend and implement a solution that would solve its current issues.
Nasstar understood the importance of uptime and ensuring that business critical applications were up and running, so providing a service that would have minimal impact on Center Parcs’ guests would be imperative.
The Benefits
Center Parcs now has a highly secure, reliable backup solution for its vast amounts of data, which can be quickly recovered should the company need to do so. Additionally, with storage billed on a fixed, price-per-month basis, the company’s costs are also transparent and predictable.
Phil Coe, Head of IT at Center Parcs, says: “We have worked with Nasstar for a number of years and have always been pleased with the standard of service received. With thousands of customer details, booking information and data stored across our Head Office and five villages, we must ensure that they are kept very secure.
“To fulfil this requirement, combat our increasing storage costs, bring our backup up-to-date and ensure infrastructure uptime, we had no hesitation in turning to Nasstar. They recommended and implemented a solution that would meet our needs not only now, but as we expand in the future.”
Nasstar understood the importance of restoring data, therefore ran restore tests before project completion ensuring the backup service was running to Center Parcs’ requirements.
With Nasstar’s Infrastructure Managed Service, the operational overhead of core infrastructure management is removed, providing further cost savings and allows the internal IT team to focus on value-add tasks including front-end activities and customer experience.
Thanks to its success they are now able to easily deliver service to its customers 24/7, the solution is being rolled out to Center Parcs’ staff across all villages.
The Solution
Following a review of the existing backup solution, Nasstar recommended its own SecureVault On-Premise Backup. This unique hybrid solution is designed specifically for large datasets to reduce Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) associated with backing up to the Cloud.
With the estate made of over 100 mixed Windows and Linux servers, Nasstar implemented a primary storage node to enable data to be backed up across the LAN. The disk-to-disk architecture ensures quicker restoration times and minimised bandwidth overheads, resulting in secure transmission to a second vault.
Encryption is also FIPS-approved as certified by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), so Center Parcs can be certain that its data is always secure. To allow for simple recovery of files and easy access to folders and entire machines, all data was backed up to the Cloud as online backup, leveraging the on-premise service.
Nasstar also provides 24/7 end-to-end management, monitoring and proactively keep the infrastructure healthy via an Infrastructure Managed Service at Center Parcs’ Head Office in Nottinghamshire.
This service ensures minimal downtime with proactive Watchpoints – a set of scheduled activities designed to help prevent outages or incidents that could impact on service – in place to flag any issues before they can take effect.
With Nasstar’s technical experts constantly on-hand to support and these solutions in place, Center Parcs can be assured of exceptional levels of uptime and a secure, fast, and cost-effective working environment.