When Goodwill Industries of Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia sought to take advantage of the flexibility, reliability and improved economics of the cloud, they knew data protection and operational backup would be an important part of their overall migration strategy. Here’s how AWS and N2W helped Goodwill migrate their infrastructure to the cloud and implement a backup and data protection plan offering lower TCO and better recovery point and recovery time performance than their previous on-premises solution.
Goodwill’s challenge
Goodwill says it simply: “Our mission is to help put people to work.” Nationwide, the not-for-profit’s 163 locations include retail stores, donation centers, and job placement services for permanent and temporary jobs, including outsourcing light industrial work. But in the words of Mark Boyd, the President and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia, “I can put up with a lot, but I cannot put up with my cash registers not being able to work.”
That’s the situation Boyd’s organization found itself in with a fully on-premises model for data backup and disaster recovery. His chapter’s 38 locations, a mix of stores, donation centers, offices, and training centers, depended on physical hardware whenever a data outage occurred.
“There were constant outages when we had physical servers in the closet,” says Briley James Yetter, Director of Technology. “We were having to replace servers every couple of years due to the depreciation that you would get with hardware. We had outages at our stores, our schools, and our offices that were preventing our employees from working and our stores from operating, and our students from learning.”
It was clear that a new solution was needed—one that could both take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of cloud technology, and that could automate a backup plan so that current data could be restored quickly.
Why Goodwill chose N2W
Goodwill Industries of Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia found Amazon Web Services when they began to explore ways to move their entire operation to the cloud. They desired an “always-on, always-available” infrastructure leveraging the value, flexibility, and elasticity of a cloud solution. After identifying AWS as their cloud provider of choice, Goodwill found N2W on the AWS Marketplace. Developed on the cloud exclusively for organizations with AWS workloads, N2W is a backup and disaster recovery solution that allows Goodwill Industries to protect its data, systems, and assets, including financial servers and point-of-sale systems.
“Since moving to AWS and N2W, we’ve been up 100% of the time.”
—Mark Boyd
President & CEO, Goodwill Industries of Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia
The combined solution allowed Goodwill to realize increased performance in terms of both recovery time and recovery point. Using AWS and N2W, Goodwill can recover from an outage within moments—a far faster recovery time than a traditional on-premises backup and disaster recovery solution.
“N2W allows me to restore a server within moments of a data or a server failure,” says Yetter.
“There’s no lost downtime because we’re able to turn servers on from a backup image almost immediately after a failure. When we ordered the N2W from the AWS Marketplace, we were able to spin it up and do an image and essentially enable the services within a couple of hours.”
To create backups with their previous on-premises solution, Goodwill needed to take their systems offline to complete backup operations. With AWS and N2W, Goodwill can stay up and running 100% of the time, even when backups are being created. N2W leverages AWS snapshots so that regular backups of production environments can be performed without downtime or maintenance windows.
Because N2W creates incremental backups, capturing only changes since the previous backup, it is a particularly efficient backup solution for a large enterprise such as Goodwill. The combination of no-maintenance windows and efficient backups enabled Goodwill to take more frequent backups of their systems and further minimize the risk of data loss.
The combined solution provides both the peace of mind necessary for a multi-location organization with many different services to manage and track, and the flexibility, scalability, and lower TCO of cloud-based backup solutions versus traditional physical servers stored and managed on-premises by IT teams.
