Yusen Logistics provides logistics services for large and small businesses. By air, water and roadway, it moves products from one place to another. Sometimes these products have to be stored in a warehouse on a temporary basis. There, employees repackage the bulk cargoes into separate parcels and ship them on to their final destination.

Merak = ultimate guarantee

Wilfried Van der Elst: “All operations are managed from one centralised server that contains all of the data on our inventory, our warehouse locations, our orders, etc. If that server crashes, we’ll have 1000 employees standing around our warehouses twiddling their thumbs. To prevent this, Yusen Logistics puts its faith in - among others - Merak. Our off-line and off-site back-ups are the ultimate way for us to ensure the continuity of our business and to guarantee that our critical data is stored securely so that it can be restored to the original drives if needed.”

The added value of tape

“At the first sign of trouble, we will obviously fall back first of all on our online back-ups or other high-availability systems. However, most high-availability systems are based on disk mirroring or disk replication, and this precisely their weak point. If you accidently erase a file from one server, that file will also be erased from the back-up server. Is it gone for good? Not if you are in possession of a recent back-up: it’s there that you’ll find the file you’re looking for.” But what do you do if your production servers, your back-up servers and your online back-ups are rendered useless all at once - a typical example of what could happen if a fire broke out in your data centre? “Sure enough, we would have to resort to our old reliable tapes, assuming they are stored securely and off-site. And this is what we rely on Merak to do for us.”