Yaron, please tell us a bit about Sarin Group…
“Sarin is a hi-tech company founded 30 years ago. We develop and manufacture hardware and software for the global diamond industry. Sarin is traded publicly on the Singapore Stock Exchange and provides its clients with a full suite of software for the analysis and mapping of diamonds from the diagnostic, planning, raw stages and until polishing and sale to end consumers.
Sarin Technologies is traded at over $160 million, with over 150 employees in Israel, of whom 40% work in development.
Sarin is a global pioneer in the field of development and manufacturing of groundbreaking technological products for the diamond industry. Since its foundation in 1988, the company has led significant changes in the procedures used by manufacturers, merchants and laboratories in the diamond industry. Sarin is on a constant momentum of growth and development, bringing new solutions to streamline the diamond trade.
The company’s products are used to plan the optimal polishing of raw diamonds, processing of diamonds by laser sawing, quality and color ratings for diamonds, mapping of flaws and laser engraving on diamonds.
The company has subsidiaries in Dalton in Israel, as well as the USA, Hong Kong and India, as well as global distributors who provide marketing, sales and support services for the company’s products.
This is indeed valuable information – the creation, documentation and monitoring of “the story of each and every diamond”, the product is precious as is the data collected in all stages of planning, polishing and sale of diamonds. How do you protect this valuable data?
“As I noted, it is indeed about the data collected on each diamond. Moreover, as a public company, we place a great deal of emphasis on internal auditing and protect our data with the full extent of means at our disposal in order to prevent any possible flaw – from external attacks to human errors on part of our own IT. To create a full security circle, we chose DataBank’s hybrid solution, which combines tapes with cloud backup and an ability to expand to DR.”
What were the alternatives you considered?
“As veteran IT specialists we are well aware of the world of cloud and its leading players. Sarin’s product suite is based on cloud solutions only in everything related to software-based products, and our hardware products are cloud based in a hybrid mechanism. This combination led us to choose DataBank’s solutions: on one hand, they have a stable quality cloud platform, on the other hand a full tape backup service at a known location, with people we know in Israel and close to our global headquarters. The solution is stable and the price is reasonable with a good ROI, continuity, high retention, without needing an integrator or another middleman. All these parameters gave us the safe feeling that we have a good local “information trustee” that backs up and protects our most precious asset – our data.”
“As a company whose headquarters, including R&D, manufacturing, finances, marketing and acquisitions are all in Israel, with the majority of data being created in Israel, it was important to us to choose a local supplier, unlike global companies that provide a private zone on a public cloud…”
What are the key services and business advantages from which you benefit thanks to your collaboration with DataBank?
“We mainly benefit from tape backup services and offsite backups which have proven very stable over the past two years. We also perform encrypted recoveries regularly.
What we’ve seen is a significant reduction in overhead, savings of additional investments in servers. We enjoy regular updates of the most cutting-edge technology, remote backup on one hand and on the other continued tape backup in compliance with regulatory demands. We transfer our data on servers based on Data Base, File Server, NetApp, which enables a smooth interface with DataBank’s existing systems.
Critical systems such as BI, CRM and ERP are all in Israel but actually provide service to all our global centers in a way that is safe and secured – and most of all, fully backed up!”
Sarin’s backup solution is based on an arcserve udp system enabling business continuity and rapid data recovery including a direct replication mechanism built directly into DataBank’s servers immediately at the end of the backup process.
The replication is based on block level incremental technology which allows transfer of changed blocks to reduce replication time as well as the bandwidth required for information transfer.
Through this process we can perform a number of backups and replications throughout the working day without affecting performance or disturbing employees, and always have an updated backup copy outside our company.