Backup & Recovery Help

Hi Everyone,

Looking for some advice here regarding a solution I was asked to work on.

The END-USER is a very large metals manufacturing plant with multiple buildings over a large industrial area.

They currently have a Corp Network and infrastructure to support the businesses IT needs.

Further to this they have roughly 350 desktop PC's around the plant monitoring and reporting on that process/station with that specific projects profile configured onto the client.

The Solution They Are Looking For:

- A Backup & Recovery solution to backup these Station PCs from a bare-metal layer all the way up to the final project loaded onto their software.

- When they restore onto another brand/model of PC, they want the install to take care of any Driver changes from brand/type of PC used previous to now on the restore.

- Somewhere central they could store all the backups, where they can organize it in such a way that the latest backups are store chronologically for easy finding of the correct version for that specific station.

Challenges I Am Facing:

- Out of these 350 clients, only about 30 are VM's with Thin Clients using TS. These are over a GB Network.

- The remaining 320 odd clients are not networked and are stand alone.

     * They currently in the process of slowly setting up mini networks to the various sectors of the plant creating about 12 little networks all connecting back to a single central management area for tracking, monitoring and reporting.

- These networks would be setup with a mini firewall in place to each "mini-site" in the plant.

- Networks currently only 100mb do to the old infrastructure.

- These units have various OS running on them, from Win7, to WinNT, to DOS, etc. So the bare-metal back is a challenge and then to restore to a different make and brand of machine.

- Since these are all old PC's they collecting from anywhere, most of these HDD's are very small, as well as the RAM (Max 512Mb and less) is very small. So any application running on these for backup should be able to do so with very limited resources and not impact the production machine. However, currently they are doing only 1 backup per month on a Plant Maintenance day so it does not impact the manufacturing runs.

Like most big legacy business like the one I am dealing with here, dont see the value in this as what they had been doing is working. Nor would this immediately add to the bottom line like if they where to purchase new plant machinery. So the budget for this is next to nothing.

The second part to this solution would be:

- Each of these Station PC's create about 8Gb of data per day

- They would like to keep this data, and retain it for 10 years (Although I dont think this is practical as its not a compliance need of theirs, but a nice to have. I would recommend for them to keep it for 5 years. Also when they update to newer systems, their custom DEV software would be updated as they start to run more VM's at these stations. So a restore from 10 years ago would not help them at the time.)

- However, this is obviously setting up a conversation for Big Data and Analytic's, pumping value back into the business through better understanding of their operations and efficiency.

My initial thoughts where, Virtualization.... then we can talk proper solutions, or at least network everything as a start.

The IT Manager as well as Plant Manager understand this, however it cant be done all at once or right now due to old legacy manufacturing systems.

If you have any further questions or need more information from me, please let me know.

Subsequently, thanks in advance for your assistance, guidance and advice you may offer.

Best Regards,

Timothy B.