Vintage IT Services is the frontrunner for Disaster Recovery in Austin, Texas, and the surrounding area. As one of the fastest-growing DR Service Providers in the world, Vintage focuses on business continuity, ensuring customers have a DR solution that is specifically tailored to suit their business needs. As Jason Smith, Manager of Cloud Services, says, “When we look at these various technologies, we look at it from a business continuity standpoint—what is the customer’s requirement and how are we going to keep their business functioning in the event of a worst-case disaster.”
Vintage sets itself apart from its competition in a fundamental way—they own and operate all aspects of its IT and DR services under one roof. This allows them to offer highly flexible solutions for their customers. In fact, it is Vintage’s goal to design a DR solution for each customer that they can leverage to benefit their organization.
For this reason, Vintage begins every customer relationship by getting to know what the customer’s business needs and goals are. Whether the customer wants to set up a simple backup of their site or a five-minute RPO/RTO, Vintage can make it happen. They can even set up a simple backup of low-priority systems and different levels of live replication for other systems. This is possible because they are capable of merging different technologies to provide a cohesive solution that is tailored to the customer’s needs.
One “Vintage” customer was hosting over 50 desktops with server applications that included an active directory, SQL databases, and line of business applications. Their specific requirement was to reduce the recovery time from disasters from four hours to under 30 minutes. Vintage used a hybrid solution of multiple technologies to reduce recovery time to 15 minutes. This essentially means that if Vintage were to go down at their primary data center, the customer could be back up and running at Vintage’s secondary data footprint in Chicago, Illinois, within 15 minutes.
Everything for that customer would be failed over; including their VDI desktop applications and server applications, and their office would be able to continue normal operations. The ownership and control Vintage has over all aspects of its operations has another benefit. It fosters a relationship of trust with the customer. There is no one else to point to when something goes wrong, and Vintage takes that responsibility very seriously. Also, Vintage is in constant communication with its customers. They regularly test solutions with their customers and listen to them. “If we do not have the capability a customer needs we will work hard to bring that capability into our portfolio as quickly as possible,” says Smith.
“What we are doing for the customer is designing a business continuity solution for them”
Vintage’s ability to serve its customers at such a high level stems from the fact that they have been in the industry for a long time. They started out in 2001 as an IT service provider/managed services provider. In 2010/2011, they expanded to offer cloud services, which include Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, DR-as-a-Service, and Backup-as-a-Service.
In 2017, Vintage expanded to include business collaboration offerings, such as file sync and share. However, their most significant accomplishment in 2017 was to open their Chicago, Illinois, data center. This was their first expansion out of the Austin market, and the goal is to have the Chicago center entirely online by the first or second quarter of 2018.
Vintage sees a bright future. They are keeping up-to-date on the continuously evolving DR technology, and their offerings are evolving in tandem. While they are currently providing disaster recovery options to customers that are hosted on their cloud footprint, it is their goal in the coming year to develop a hybrid scenario that would allow them to provide DR services to clients that are not hosted with them, thus expanding their ability to serve more customers than ever before.