MediaWatch ME backs up data with Maxtor

MediaWatch ME, established in 2003 in Dubai Media City (DMC), has a reputation for delivering accurate reports to Clients across the Middle East & Africa region, relating to the company's competitor news, measurement of its marketing & public relations activities as well as media visibility in the marketplace. MediaWatch ME counts BMW, Etisalat and the World Bank among its 250-plus private and government clientele.

In a busy office located in the heart of DMC, employees are settled in among hundreds of publications that are stacked neatly into every nook and cranny. From 5:30 a.m. onwards, the reading team carefully filters all the media with a discerning eye, careful not to miss even the smallest bit of relevant news and client coverage.

On an average day, MediaWatch ME scans approximately 180 articles an hour in Client coverage. To date, MediaWatch ME has monitored in excess of one million articles across the region, with over half this amount of articles active on live servers.

Under the weight of all this information, Managing Director Mazen Nahawi needed an effective backup solution. "Our current servers were under pressure with more than three years of data. Without effective backup, much of that vital information would have been deleted or downloaded onto CD-ROMS," said Nahawi. "This would have made searching our corporate records and archives a lengthy and cumbersome experience."

After looking at a range of options, the company brought in a Maxtor OneTouch™ II Small Business Edition 200GB (300GB compressed) drive to automatically back up its servers every night. This drive also presented MediaWatch ME with the flexibility to launch a backup directly from the IT manager's desktop or schedule unattended backups at convenient times for the operational team.

With its sleek and compact design, the Maxtor OneTouch™ II Small Business Edition provides easy installation with a simple wizard interface for quick setup. The drives offers automated, unattended backup schedules, drive management, Maxtor DriveLock™ security, remote notification, and easy backup and restoration. Installation in the MediaWatch ME office took less than an hour and the Maxtor hard drive now records thousands of pieces of information accumulated from scans of client coverage in the media.

More drives have been installed throughout the Media Watch ME offices, primarily to safeguard and back up the results of monitoring client coverage 24 hours a day. The Maxtor OneTouch II Small Business Edition solutions installed on the main Windows servers has enabled MediaWatch ME to back up its entire corporate history in addition to its monitoring archive.

In utilizing two Maxtor OneTouch II Small Business Edition solutions as primary and secondary backup, MediaWatch ME can guarantee the safeguarding of its data. This is a key requirement for the company, which must be able to produce all past coverage of its clients at a moment's notice.

After the initial success of the Maxtor OneTouch II hard drives at the online and print MediaWatch ME center, three more drives able to store thousands of hours of footage have been installed at the broadcast monitoring departments in Dubai and Jordan for backup rotation. This provides added data security.

"When we were introduced to Maxtor, we found exactly what we needed," concluded Nahawi. MediaWatch ME is now considering further Maxtor products to back up and restore older articles, as well as examining the possibility of developing a live archive system.