Customer Case Study | October 2010Fred. Olsen safeguards customer
service levels with automateddata backup

Industry: Travel/Cruise

CLIENT PROFILE

Company: Fred. Olsen
Employees: approximately 2,000

BUSINESSCHALLENGE

SOLUTION

BENEFIT

Fred. Olsen is a group ofFrom serving meals in theFred. Olsen uses ArcserveFred. Olsen is able tocompanies owned by theship restaurants to taking

Backup throughout its

backup and restore

Olsen family. Its main

new cruise bookings, theUK operations to protect

data easily and reliably,

UK-based businesses areavailability of Fred. Olsen’s

four terabytes of data

which has helped reduce

focused on renewablesystems and data isfrom all its businesscosts, maximise staff

energy, cruises and travel.

crucial to its customer

systems, including email,productivity and safeguard

services. Data backup

HR, accounting and ship

customer services.

must therefore be fast

management systems.

and reliable.

Customer Success Story: Fed. Olsen | October 2010

BUSINESSA family travel businessFred. Olsen is a Norwegian family business founded in 1848. The group includes 12 companies with businessinterests ranging from transportation and shipping to renewable energy and estate management.
The group’s UK-based operations are mainly concerned with travel and leisure. Fred. Olsen owns and operates fourcruise liners.
Fred. Olsen’s goal is to expand its travel business while maintaining the personal touch of the family business.

CHALLENGE
Providing an exemplary customer experience
Providing a high quality of customer service is a key priority for Fred. Olsen — particularly within its travel business.
As John Merry from IT Technical Support at Fred. Olsen, explains, “A cruise is a once in a lifetime opportunity formany of our customers. We need to ensure that they have an exemplary experience, from when they book theholiday to the moment they return to shore.”
To ensure staff working at its travel agencies and onboard the cruise liners can respond rapidly to customer
requests, Fred. Olsen needs its business systems and data to be highly available. “IT downtime can impact all ourcustomer-facing and back office operations — from serving customers in ships’ restaurants and managing bookings
to running the monthly payroll,” adds Merry.
The nature of Fred. Olsen’s UK-based businesses means that its IT infrastructure is highly distributed. The company
has around 100 servers and 500 desktops across its offices and five retail outlets plus 10 servers and 70 desktop
computers on each of its four ships.

We need to have conﬁdence that we
can restore data easily when at sea.
Andrew Ericsson | IT Manager

Customer Success Story: Fed. Olsen | October 2010

In the event of a hardware failure or the accidental deletion of business-critical data, Fred. Olsen needs to be able
to restore documents, files and systems quickly to minimise impact to customer service and business continuity.
Backup processes therefore need to be fast and reliable, particularly onboard the company’s ships.
Andrew Ericsson, IT Manager at Fred. Olsen, comments, “We need to be confident that we can restore data easily
when at sea. However we only have a limited backup window as the process must be completed after the last bar
shuts at night and before the first shop opens in the morning.”

SOLUTION
Automated and consolidated backup
Fred. Olsen has successfully used Arcserve Backup in the UK since 2000 to safeguard its business systems anddata. The group was using different versions of the solution at different sites and partnered with IT reseller Misco toupgrade and consolidate its backup systems in January 2010.
Ericsson comments, “We reviewed a number of solutions on the market, but the Arcserve solution continued tooffer the best value. We particularly liked the new tape management functionality and flexible pricing model.”Fred. Olsen deployed the solution inhouse over six months, taking a phased approach. “Arcserve Backup v12.5 wasvery easy to install and configure. On the few occasions we required help from Arcserve’s support services, they
were very responsive and enabled us to resolve our problems quickly,” adds Merry.
Arcserve Backup protects four terabytes of data from eight Exchange servers and SQL and Oracle databases
running in both Windows and Linux platforms. This incorporates all the company’s business systems, from email
and accounting systems to order and ship management tools.
These systems and data are backed up on a nightly basis to tape. Merry comments, “Arcserve Backup automates
the backup process and supports multiple tapes and jobs simultaneously, thereby halving the time taken to run astandard backup routine.”
Once the backup process is complete, the Arcserve solution verifies the data and provides at-a-glance reporting
to enable staff to confirm the backup has run correctly. If a failure occurs, the solution pauses backup processes
until the problem is resolved, avoiding the need for a lengthy restart. The solution also provides barcode reading toautomate and simplify tape library management.

Customer Success Story: Fed. Olsen | October 2010

BENEFITContinuous and high quality customer services
By consolidating its backup processes with Arcserve Backup v12.5, Fred. Olsen is able to backup and restore data
across all its UK operations quickly and easily.
“By automating backup and reporting, the Arcserve solution maximises the efficiency of our IT team,” comments
Merry. “We use the Arcserve system a number of times a month to retrieve files, so the solution’s rapid andstraightforward restoration process is also beneficial.”
Arcserve Backup has also enabled Fred. Olsen to:•Reduce costs through lower hardware requirements for the tape library and easier support and maintenance•Maximise staff productivity•

Safeguard customer service levels.

Although Arcserve Backup is currently just used for tape backups, Fred. Olsen plans to take advantage of thesolution’s disk staging features in the future, to enable files to be restored within an hour.
“Arcserve Backup gives us peace of mind that we can provide staff with access to the systems and data they need,regardless of whether they are on land or at sea. This is crucial to ensuring that our customers have an exemplary
cruise experience,” concludes Ericsson.

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referenced herein belong to their respective companies. The information and results illustrated here are based upon the speaker’s experienceswith the referenced software product in a variety of environments, which may include production and non production environments.