Pyrotek Forges Path to Business-Critical SharePoint Environment with Confidence and Ease

OVERVIEW

Pyrotek is a global organization specializing in the development, manufacture and sale of a diverse range of high-temperature materials such as aluminum, zinc, glass, steel and more in support of industrial applications. With 66 locations in 31 countries, Pyrotek uses its industry-leading expertise and international resources to provide innovative solutions that help customers continually achieve higher quality standards and improve their operational efficiencies at a total lower cost. Pyrotek’s team of product specialists and scientists specialize in refining existing products and creating new materials to meet changing customer needs. This effort is supported by strategic alliances with its suppliers and backed by ISO Quality Assurance Standards in each of its major facilities.

To enable the collaboration that fuels product innovation, design and sales, Pyrotek uses SharePoint 2013.

• Currently using SharePoint as a collaboration tool across 200+ users with a plan to deploy it as a business critical application to 2,000+ users
• Metalogix tools and support provide powerful safety net – saving time, mitigating risk and streamlining content migration
• Solutions deployed: Metalogix Backup for SharePoint, ControlPoint and Content Matrix

THE CHALLENGE

While Pyrotek’s initial deployment of SharePoint is limited to approximately 200 users, the company plans to expand its use from a pure collaboration tool into a business-critical application that will serve as a central hub for the entire business. Pyrotek’s SharePoint environment will eventually comprise document libraries, collaboration projects and other mission-critical business content serving 2,000+ personnel.

Supporting such a large, global deployment brings with it several challenges. Like many organizations, Pyrotek’s IT department is a small shop and it soon became clear that managing the complexity of its SharePoint strategy could not be handled by humans alone.

“Being able to properly manage SharePoint, for us, was just as critical as having it,” said Kristopher Roy, Pyrotek’s SharePoint Engineer.

Based on his own experience, Roy quickly determined that out-of-the-box SharePoint management tools lacked the automation and insight needed to manage the scale of the company’s business-critical deployment. What Pyrotek needed was a set of comprehensive and intuitive management and data backup tools that could help the business manage the complexity of its SharePoint environment for the long-haul. Specifically, Pyrotek sought a solution that would:

• Maintain backups that were easily restorable in a timely and efficient manner
• Allow them to scope out and maintain permissions across multiple sites
• Manage content across all farms for development and testing capabilities

THE SOLUTION

Following extensive testing of numerous toolsets, the company chose Metalogix ControlPoint for its extensive yet easy-to-use SharePoint permission management and governance enforcement features. To support its content migration activities, Pyrotek selected Metalogix Content Matrix for its one- hop, high-speed, high-fidelity migration capabilities. “The ability to migrate content quickly across farms with Metalogix Content Matrix is a huge benefit for us. The speed of migration from one farm to another has really helped us keep downtime to a minimum while freeing up resources,” said Kristopher.

Despite these deployments, a significant risk remained. Kristopher’s team needed a solution for mitigating potential outages and ensuring the availability of critical content always. While the company already had Symantec for system-wide backups in place, this proved to be less than ideal for managing SharePoint-specific backups. To reduce the bottleneck of relying on the systems infrastructure backups, Kristopher Roy and his SharePoint team wanted to own their backup and restore process that would work with their existing method.”

To ensure minimal downtime and disruption to users, Pyrotek required a backup toolset that could restore entire sites and content quickly and efficiently, while avoiding the time-consuming bottlenecks created by system-wide backups. For this Pyrotek turned to Metalogix Backup for SharePoint.

“We needed something that would allow us to restore either an entire site or just a single document, depending on our needs – as quickly and efficiently as possible,” explained Kristopher. “We didn’t want to run an entire system restore just to reinstate a simple service application database. Instead, we needed the flexibility to be able to pick and choose what content restores and to do so in a couple of clicks. Backup for SharePoint gives my team and even individual users, the capability to do just that”

Backup for SharePoint is purpose-built for SharePoint environments and lets users:

• Backup and restore SharePoint content in a fraction of the time
• Reduce storage costs with automated compression and encryption
• Save time and headaches with easy self-service recovery for end users

According to Kristopher, a key differentiator for Metalogix is its commitment to product development and user needs:

“Metalogix has done a great job of incorporating the positive aspects of the teams and solutions that they’ve acquired. We truly appreciate the ongoing commitment that Metalogix demonstrates to further enhancing their solutions such as ensuring that Metalogix Backup for SharePoint provides support for SharePoint 2013, which is critical for us.”

Kristopher also credited the Metalogix support team as a significant differentiator: “The response time for every support call is incredible. Metalogix responds within an hour and problems are resolved in less than 24 hours. Another huge bonus for us is that Metalogix’s technicians are extremely professional and know what they’re doing.”

THE RESULTS

Pyrotek has seen a significant return in its investment achieving time and cost savings as well as significant risk avoidance as it migrates its users to SharePoint 2013:

“Knowing that we’ve got good backups – from a granular level right up to an entire farm – is invaluable when it comes to managing risk and ensuring peace of mind. Backup for SharePoint is our safety net!”

Empowered by Metalogix tools, Kristopher’s team is also free of traditional SharePoint management bottlenecks: “At a minimum my time spent managing SharePoint has been cut in half, and the less time my team has to spend fixing things, the more time we can spend on other projects.”