Paraca Inc. decided to relocate its backup system from its Tokyo head office to its Osaka branch as part of a new business continuity plan. It also began using the SAP ERP software solution which required backups of those servers. To address these backup needs, Paraca adopted PlateSpin Forge which shortened backup times from 3 hours to 30 minutes and allowed Paraca to meet IT compliance requirements.

1. Success Story
Paraca Inc.
spot colors:
Formerly, Paraca's administrative systems, including backup, were clustered at its
head office in Tokyo. As part of a new business continuity plan (BCP), the company
had decided to relocate its backup system to the Osaka branch. Meanwhile, Paraca
had begun using ERP, the business software solution from SAP. This meant the
servers running SAP ERP also needed to be backed up. As a solution to both of
these problems, the company decided to adopt PlateSpin Forge. Besides shortening
the backup process from 3 hours to 30 minutes, PlateSpin Forge has enabled
Paraca to meet the IT requirements for compliance with J-SOX (the Japanese
equivalent of the American Sarbanes-Oxley Act relating to corporate governance
and financial practice).
Overview
In line with its stated corporate mission of
"eliminating Japan's parking shortage and making
things comfortable for our motorized society,"
Paraca offers an array of parking lot operation
and management services, ranging from
consulting to financing and business
administration. Its company name is a mixture of
Spanish and English, hinting at two meanings:
"for cars" and "here are some parking spaces."
The issues involved
Paraca's signs feature a capital letter "P" with two
eyes. This "P" also has two meanings, standing for
both "parking" and "professional." The eyes also
have a double significance. As well as symbolizing
"site evaluation"—in the sense of meticulous
market surveys and property surveys—they also
symbolize "overseeing"—in the sense of operation
and management, including taking care of
cleaning, instrument problems and setting charges.
In the company's professional operation of parking
lots, the use of IT plays a vital role.
Paraca's mission-critical systems were running on
servers in a data center in the Tokyo area.
However, as part of its BCP, the company decided
to relocate its backup-and-restore environment to
the server room at its Osaka branch. Following
this decision, it was looking for an efficient backup
solution functioning between the Tokyo-area data
center and the Osaka-branch server room, which
were to be linked by an Internet virtual private
network (VPN).
In July 2010, Paraca also rebuilt its mission-critical
systems to revolve around SAP ERP. This created
the need for a SAP ERP system backup solution.
"We have SAP ERP running on five servers in our live
environment alone," says Mr. Hideyuki Nakamura, a
Systems Analyst at the company's Administration
Department, "and then there are our development
servers and our test servers and so on. Installing
standby machines at the Osaka branch to back up
all those servers was tough to do."
This was not the only problem. Paraca had set up
a backup-and-restore environment using
commercial software; however, the failure of a
physical server had to be handled by setting up
another physical server, configuring the OS and
applications, and then restoring the data from
backups. Because this task was so time-consuming,
the company needed a solution that would enable it
to swiftly recover from server failures.
"SAP ERP is not linked to our parking lot operation
system," points out Mr. Nakamura, "so even if SAP
ERP goes down, our parking lot services are not
interrupted. However, we are a listed company, so
any system outage could affect our perceived
reliability. That is why we needed a solution that
would get our administrative systems back up
quickly, even if the SAP ERP system is down."
Solution
In December 2010, looking to introduce a
backup-and-restore solution for its BCP and its
SAP ERP system, Paraca compared proposals
from several companies. As a result, it decided to
install PlateSpin Forge. Paraca chose this product
for a number of reasons. One was that it allows a
failure recovery test to be carried out with ease at
the click of a mouse, thanks to virtualization
technology. Its extensive track record in SAP ERP
backup was another.
Overview:
Paraca is engaged in parking lot operation
and management, consulting on the
operation and management of parking lots,
asset management and financing, and other
related services.
Industry sector:
Service
Location:
Japan
Novell products and services used:
PlateSpin Forge
Benefits:
– Backup process duration reduced from 3
hours to 30 minutes
– Paraca now meets IT requirements for
J-SOX compliance
– In the event of an equipment failure,
operations can be swiftly resumed
When I saw the PlateSpin Forge
demo at Novell's offices, I immediately
knew that this solution was right for
us. It was very reassuring to be able
to confirm that the product is easy to
use, and that in the event of an
equipment failure, we would be able
to recover with minimal downtime.
Mr. Teruhiko Iwamoto
Systems Analyst, Administration Department

2. We were shown a demo at Novell's offices, says Mr.
Teruhiko Iwamoto, another Systems Analyst in the
Administration Department. As soon as I saw it, I
knew this solution was right for us. It goes without
saying that the backup operation is easy, but so is
the restore operation, and it is quick too, so it has all
the functions we need. Those were the main reasons
why we plumped for PlateSpin Forge.
In January 2011, Paraca embarked on the task of
installing PlateSpin Forge. The Tokyo-area data
center where SAP ERP is running was connected
to PlateSpin Forge at the Osaka branch by means
of an Internet VPN. The connection went live in
April. Although Paraca has now installed PlateSpin
Forge for ten server workloads, it initially backed
up the five live servers running SAP ERP.
The company that proposed PlateSpin Forge to
Paraca was Dell Japan. One of Dell Japan's
strengths was that, besides selling servers and client
PCs by themselves, it could also propose a solution
combining the necessary hardware and software.
Having already studied PlateSpin Forge, Dell Japan
was internally well-informed about the product.
It was obvious that Paraca's BCP would require
more than just a combination of servers and
storage, as Paraca was also struggling with
high-volume, time-consuming backup-and-restore
operations. Dell Japan therefore proposed
PlateSpin Forge as a solution that would neatly
meet both needs. One outstanding advantage of
this solution is that the backup-and-restore
operations take place in a virtualized environment,
making them easy to perform.
Benefits gained by introducing Novell
solutions
Before introducing PlateSpin Forge, Paraca used
to spend about three hours a day, after nighttime
processing, backing up its SAP ERP system. Mr.
Nakamura explains why this daily backup was
necessary. If we had just backed up the changed
files, he says, in the event of a failure, we would
have had to restore the full backup first and then
restore the changed files as well. That would have
taken too long. For the sake of a slightly faster
recovery, we took a full backup every day.
PlateSpin Forge lets us perform failure recovery
in a very short space of time, Mr. Nakamura
continues, so once we have taken a full backup,
we only need to back up the changed files from
then on. This has cut the backup operation down
to about 30 minutes. When we first installed
PlateSpin Forge, we were worried that we might
not be able to finish the backup operation in one
night, but in fact there were no problems at all. It
has also enabled us to reduce network traffic.
The verification confirmed that PlateSpin Forge is
easy to use, adds Mr. Iwamoto, and convinced
us that, in the event of an equipment failure, we
would be able to recover with minimal downtime,
so we were greatly reassured about keeping our
day-to-day operations up and running. Another
handy feature is that, thanks to virtualization
technology, verifying a restore is just as easy as
taking a backup. In the restore verification, we
were able to achieve service recovery in about an
hour.
Something else that is really convenient, says
Mr. Nakamura, is that if an equipment failure
occurs, we do not have to select a server
environment—a physical or virtual server—to
restore to, and we can restore our services by
connecting directly to the virtual server on
PlateSpin Forge. Because the backup-and-restore
operation is now so easy, we have also been able
to meet the IT management requirements for
J-SOX compliance.
Future developments
Describing Paraca's future plans, Mr. Nakamura
says, apart from the servers running our SAP
ERP system, we also manage file servers, servers
running groupware and others. We still use
commercial backup software products to back
them up. Going forward, we intend to use
PlateSpin Forge to back up those servers as well.
Previously, the backup process took three hours, but with PlateSpin Forge,
it just takes 30 minutes to back up the changed files. This has also enabled
us to meet the backup-and-restore requirements for J-SOX compliance.
Mr. Hideyuki Nakamura
Systems Analyst, Administration Department
www.novell.com
spot colors:
For More Information:
To read more customer
success stories, visit:
www.novell.com/success
Contact your Solutions Provider,
or call:
Australia
1-800-668-355
China
400-6800-862
Hong Kong
800-930-994
India
91-80-4002-2300
Japan
0120-948-059
Malaysia
60-3-7722-6100
New Zealand
0800-441-671
Singapore
65-6395-6888
South Korea
82-11-3131-464
Taiwan
886-2-23760000
Novell, Inc.
1800 South Novell Place
Provo, UT 84606 USA
468-AP1581-001 | 05/12 | © 2011 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. Novell, the Novell logo, the N logo, PlateSpin, PlateSpin Forge and SUSE are registered
trademarks or trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the USA. Other company names and product names that appear in this article are registered trademarks or
trademarks of their respective owners.
* All third-party trademarks belong to their respective holders.
21