Since its founding in 1936, A.O. Smith Water Products Company has placed a premium on engineering excellence. This has resulted in many “firsts” in both residential and commercial water heaters and boilers. For over 60 years, an ongoing commitment to innovation and continuous product improvement has made A.O. Smith one of the most trusted, most asked for names in water heaters.

Water heaters and backup software have similar challenges. Customers don’t necessarily want to know what is running or how it runs, just that it works. In the case of a water heater, that the water is hot. And when it is not, it better be fixed quickly. A.O. Smith is a leader in water products. Company growth led to some challenges from both an infrastructure perspective and a customer service perspective.

A.O. Smith was faced with key challenges. As with many companies, the amount of data was taking longer and longer to backup. The company found that the more data they protected, the larger the backup window became. This created a problem that had the potential to affect the overall company productivity. “Backup became more and more difficult because there simply weren’t enough hours in the day. We are a 24/7 company and that means making data available at all times,” said Rick Graham, IT Director for A.O. Smith Water Products. A byproduct of being “on” all the time, limited backup time. Restores are a necessity to any backup strategy to confirm your backups are executing properly should a data disaster occur. One solution was to stage the data and eventually move off to tape. At the time, implementing an effective disk-to-disk-to-tape solution was proving to not only be difficult with their existing backup solution, but time consuming and expensive.

From a business perspective, maintaining the existing solution was costly. A.O. Smith had a competitive backup solution for Windows deployed across its 31 server network. The price to renew service contracts and keep the latest software releases up to date was cost prohibitive.

Employing a special appliance (e.g. Virtual Tape Library Appliance) for staging data was not attractive either since it would tie the company into a hardware based solution and would not be cost effective. A.O. Smith Water Products made the decision to investigate alternative backup software solutions.

Yosemite began working with A.O. Smith Water Products identifying the optimal solution for their needs. The first step was identifying the goals of A.O. Smith Water Products. “Eliminating the need for a backup window and creating an efficient restore strategy was key”, stated Rick Graham.

Yosemite recommended its flagship product, Yosemite Backup Advanced 8. The total solution included protection for all 31 servers, online Agents for Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Oracle and Open File Backup. The key component was the D2D2N^e (Disk-to-Disk-to-Any) Virtual Library option. This innovative new feature allowed them to create a virtual library utilizing existing hard disk space. “Yosemite offered the best backup to disk solution with the D2D2N^e Virtual Library option. It helped us implement an easy and robust backup strategy without buying an expensive, hardware based appliance”, explained Rick Graham.

A.O. Smith reaped significant benefits from its new backup software solution. First, the new solution cost less than a third of the incumbent backup solution. Second, backup performance has increased tenfold by simply offering a new approach to staging and storing data.

Yosemite has dedicated a great deal of time and personnel investment to ensure the A.O. Smith solution was a success. And the two companies continue to foster a relationship for continued support.

Yosemite Technologies™ is a global provider of backup software solutions that span from single-sever environments to the enterprise. Yosemite develops heterogeneous solutions that protect environments running Windows, Linux & NetWare. Yosemite's flagship product, Yosemite Backup Advanced™ represents the next generation of enterprise backup software with Self Tuning Logic™ for fast backup and restore operations, an integrated Virtual Library option, D2D2N^e, that provides multi-level heterogeneous "Disk-to-Disk-to-Any” backup.

Yosemite has developed strong technology and channel partnerships with leading companies including HP, Dell, Microsoft, Quantum, and Iomega. The company's commitment to Backup Simplified™ represents Yosemite's focus on delivering products that offer unmatched performance, ease-of-use, and value.