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Starwood Hotels to push successful Storagecraft implementation nationwide

Hotel chain boasts superior performance with new backup system, plans further roll out

Starwood Group planning to push Storagecraft backup nationwide and beyond

Hotel chain boasts superior performance with new backup system, plans to roll out internationally

International hotel operator Starwood Group claims it has improved its backup and retrieval times by staggering amounts with the introduction of StorageCraft’s new backup system, and may roll it out internationally.

Starwood Group encompases big brands such as The Sheraton, Four Points and Westin Hotels. It had been running on an outdated tape based system , and chose StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect backup to modernise its data systems and improve backup and retrieval efficiency across its ten Australian five star hotels.

"We needed a solution that would deliver instant backup and retrieval, and protect our group against whatever disaster could possibly hit a hotel,” said Lindsay Leigh, regional director of IT at Starwood Pacific Hotels.

“We are 100 per cent confident that ShadowProtect delivers this level of data security and will continue to do so.”

Starwood has around 100 servers across Australia. These are backed up to server with 25TB of data, replicated to another 25TB server the company will eventually move off site. The issues with such long lead times between backup completion and data retrieval were obvious and the company needed to make the move to a more efficient system.

ShadowProtect now automates backups to Starwood’s main data server every fifteen minutes. Starwood claims that each backup now takes thirty seconds as opposed to twenty six hours for the old tape based system. Individual servers around the country are then backed up every hour or two hours, depending on how critical data is to operations. Backups are staggered throughout the day to avoid congestion, this allows replication offsite through a relatively inexpensive internet link.

Leigh says that, due to the success of the system, Starwood is looking at rolling out the software to the remainder of its Australian operations, and perhaps beyond.

“We are looking to use ShadowProtect across the whole of Asia (where Starwood has more than 370 hotels), and then across the entire world if we can get it off the ground. Now the Australian implementation has gone so well, we will begin targeting Asia.”