Winning Data Recovery Strategy Pays Off For Niemann Capital Management

In the past, if NCM were to lose a site, the best it could hope for was to get back online in two days. It would then take another 12 days to get everything running at full capacity, and that just wasn’t acceptable. The goal was to find a solution with the recovery capabilities needed, within the parameters NCM had to work with.

 “When you’re managing other people’s money, you’re highly accountable for everything that goes on, and the liability can be pretty extreme,” said John Etheridge, IT Director, Niemann Capital Management. “In our business, if the servers went offline or we had downtime at the wrong time in the day, that hinders our ability to trade, distribute funds, liquidate and so forth, so it’s critical for us to be able to recover our data and maintain operations. In the past, if I were to lose a site, the best I could hope for was to get back online in two days. It would then take another 12 days to get everything running at full capacity, and that just wasn’t acceptable. My goal was to find a solution with the recovery capabilities we needed, within the parameters we had to work with.”

As he began the search for the right recovery solution, Etheridge analyzed such factors as the number of IT personnel, financial commitment and time commitment that each product would ultimately require. He initially considered the strategy of fault tolerant sites, but in the end decided the return-on-investment was not compelling enough.