A leading oilfield services provider, Complete Production Services (CPS) supplies all-inclusive well production solutions to the world’s largest oil and gas companies. With seven divisions throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico, CPS is supported by onsite IT staff that provide local individual PC support, and a centralized information technology (IT) group which handles all infrastructure, applications and data.

With all of its data hosted in corporate data centers in Houston and Calgary, CPS’ infrastructure contains more than 90 servers, necessitating an efficient back-up solution. In the past, the IT group relied upon Symantec’s Backup Exec which had worked well, but was now proving unable to handle some of the load without decreasing enterprise efficiencies. "The problem we had was that a full backup in the Houston data center would take 36 hours," said Mike Pate, CPS IT director. "It could only be done over the weekend because while the server was getting backed up it would slow down so much that it was really hard for anyone to work on it. And, if there was any problem whatsoever we’d have to re-fire a complete backup on Monday, creating a huge problem. We were also doing incremental backups every night that took six hours – a very tight timeframe."

To remedy these issues Pate looked into the logical next step of upgrading Backup Exec to Symantec’s Netbackup product. He quickly found though that the architecture wasn’t going to be able to meet CPS’ needs, so he began to research an alternative solution. "As a fluke I went to a Microsoft seminar on System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) for a disaster recovery solution," shared Pate. "It blew me away. I found that DPM was not only a good solution for our disaster recovery needs, but it could also replace Backup Exec for our day-to-day backup needs."