Success Stories

The North West Provincial Government of South Africa decided to use GWAVA product Reload to assure quick recovery to their GroupWise system and server.

The North West Provincial Government is a state government for the North West province in the Country of South Africa. 

To help the IT department provide backup, quick restore and disaster recovery for GroupWise, they employ GWAVA Reload for backing up their GroupWise system. A recent scare illustrated the powerful backup and disaster recovery functionality of Reload.

One recent morning, de Beer saw the following error message on the server console of one of his NetWare servers: Server failed to boot.“We had a total hardware failure on our main domain and post office server that hosts mail for thousands of users,” he recalled. “The post office size was around 195GBs though all other domains and six post offices were still in place.”Complete panic set in as he first tried to “revive” the hardware at all costs, returning at 23h55, but still no fix. When this failed, the only fallback he had was their backups. “Luckily we were running Reload. I checked and saw that the last backup ran was the previous night, which was 100% as scheduled as part of our daily weekday schedule,” said de Beer.De Beer is quick to mention that for almost four years they did not have any backup and had been running Reload for only the last 10 months. “Imagine the scare I had.I already could see myself fixing PCs from home as my ‘new’ career.”

Panic Turns to Recovery

"I knew about the disaster recovery option from Reload, but hadn’t set it up before- always tomorrow - you know how it goes in IT, always something else that must be done now.”So, he reached out to GWAVA South Africa and asked for help. GWAVA’s Tay Kratzer, Reload Developer, was available. Kratzer helped set up the failed GroupWise post office to run on the GWAVA Reload server. Within a short time the failed GroupWise post office was running on the Reload box and de Beer’s users could access the post office again (after one DNS entry update).hey then kicked off the Reload post office migration feature but had no idea how long that would take. The pre-migration of approximately 90% of the data being migrated was restored from the NAS (NetApp iSCSI connected R200 device) the Reload server is connected to, to the production server in around 18 hours. The pre-migration migrated 175 GB of data.While the pre-migration of the post office was running, the post office was still up and functioning fully on the Reload server. The Reload server was also backing up other GroupWise post offices and domains that are regularly scheduled for backups each day. Once the Reload server had pre-migrated the data to the production server, De Beer then unloaded the live post office agent on the Reload server to start with the final portion of the post office migration (the last 10%). That was done in around three hours. Once this was completed, he installed the GroupWise Agent software to the production server and loaded the post office agent (POA). The post office was all up and running.“GWAVA Reload works brilliantly. If you are a GroupWise administrator, get yourself GWAVA Reload and set up disaster recovery for all post offices and domains before disaster strikes. Once it’s set up and tested it is merely a ‘flip of the switch’ while your users can work seamlessly and uninterrupted.