• Home
• Articles Archive
• Features List

• Media Pack
• Contact Us
• Subscribe

THE CANDY MAN CAN...

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 5 - August 2007

Jamie Oliver's Sweet As Candy business enterprise has found just the right ingredients to handle its ever increasing storage requirements

As Jamie Oliver might say, success is tasty. Oliver is one of Britain's most successful young entrepreneurs, having enjoyed triumphs across a broad spectrum in all of his expanding business interests - from investing in new media ventures, to property and his food companies. He is now effectively a global brand in his own right; his cooking shows are broadcast in more than 50 countries and his cookery books have been translated into 23 languages, with a staggering12.2m copies sold worldwide.

Oliver is also a chef who never shies away from a challenge. In 2001, he set up Fifteen Foundation, a charity that trains unemployed young adults to become professional chefs, gambling a million pounds of his own money on its success - a gamble which has since paid off, in terms of recent profit reports and much earned respect within the food industry.

One thing Oliver's IT team won't gamble with, however, is his company's data storage. Although many of the companies under the Jamie Oliver umbrella - the TV production company Fresh One or the retail company Fresh Retail Ventures, for example - vary in different ways, they all share something in common: they all have the same IT infrastructure and all back up to the same storage solution.

To support its daily operations, parent company Sweet as Candy manages a mainly Windows-based network, utilising 14 separate servers, including a SQL server, an Exchange server and five file servers. Due to rapid growth, there are currently two SANs in place: a legacy SAN of 250 GB and a new SAN of 7.5 TB, to which they are migrating.

DOUBLED IN SIZE
On account of the eclectic nature of all the companies that fall under Sweet as Candy Holdings, the data held on the SAN ranges between anything from 80 MB jpegs that are used for high quality magazine work to a SQL Database that remains permanently connected to the tills and reservation database at the Fifteen Restaurant.

Sweet as Candy Holdings has effectively doubled in size every year. In 2002, the employee count came to just five, while, five years later, it now boasts a total of around 250 employees across the group, which includes 60 people in the Sweet as Candy office, 100 in the restaurant, 10 people in the Fifteen Foundation charity, its 15 apprentices and six in the TV production company.

A growth of such magnitude will unavoidably be reflected in the corporate IT environment and it wasn't long before IT and systems manager Andy Murrell and senior IT administrator Piers White found themselves with a backup issue that needed to be resolved fast.

"Prior to our new backup system," states Murrell, "we had a manual-based approach to our backup procedure. We would do a daily backup on to an LTO tape drive, trading tapes daily. But it got to the stage where data was starting to overlap on to the second tape, or the tapes weren't being changed at all, ultimately causing the backup to fail, which was any IT manager's nightmare. Also, because the growth of the company was so phenomenal, trying to keep ahead of the growth as new people and subsequently their data joined the business, it got to the point where the single drive on the back of the server was inadequate for the job. Having the responsibility of 14 companies data on our shoulders, we knew something had to be done."

Sweet as Candy approached data storage specialists NCE to architect and integrate a solution that would address their needs in a situation that needed to be resolved fast. The solution team at NCE presented the IT team at Sweet as Candy with their 'Little Book of Data Storage' - a guide to the current world of data storage - and suggested that Breece Hill's iStoRA might just be the solution best suited to their needs.

"We knew from the start that a disk to disk to tape (D2D2T) solution would be best suited to our IT environment," states Murrell. "Having seen the overview in the Little Book, we decided to do a bit more research on the web. The iStoRA ticked all the boxes. For a start, it was a RAID array, which provided a lot of hard disk space, so we could back up disk to disk. It also had its own server and, by having all the benefits in one box, we also saved on rack space. Having NCE as our one point of contact for installation, service and support has proved of great convenience and piece of mind." Unlike many other products, the iStoRA provides a fully integrated D2D2T platform, with all components tested and qualified to work together - each within 4U of rack space.

Using best-in-class components - Symantec Backup Exec Server System Recovery, with Hitachi disks and HP LTO 3 tapes - the iStoRA would soon eliminate many of Sweet as Candy's IT headaches.

Once the iStoRA had been installed, Sweet as Candy started to see immediate results. "The reduction in backup time has been phenomenal," says Piers White, “because we don't have to change tapes so often. The backups were previously running for 21 hours a day - they now run from 8pm till 3 am [seven hours], which has made a huge difference."

Adds Murrell: "Also, the main advantage with using the iStoRA is that of backing up to disk. We can restore quickly, whereas before, when it was taking 21 hours to back up to tape, if we wanted to restore, we had to stop the backups - which was a very lengthy process."

Now Sweet as Candy has Backup Exec System Recovery on most servers, with images copied to the iStoRA Disk Array. This gets backed up to tape, using Symantec Backup Exec, and taken off site. The backups are mainly kept on disk for about a week, which enables the IT team to carry out quick restores - a virtue that's never taken for granted.

The future
"'At Sweet as Candy, things are always on the move," states White. "It's a new challenge every day and you're dealing with so many different types of people. You've got the 'creatives', the 'foodies' and the ever-increasing admin requirements. New databases are cropping up all the time. For example, an online booking system for the London restaurant (Fifteen) has been made available on the website since June - which works in conjunction with the reservation system. It's good to know that we can rely on the iStoRA not only to back up our valuable data, but also to archive our data as new compliancy regulations come into force." ST