Graphoprint
Samarind has helped an important client rise like a phoenix from the ashes. In March Graphoprint Ltd, a printing services company near Samarind’s office on Deeside Industrial Park, was severely damaged by fire. The blaze started on the Saturday evening of the Easter bank holiday weekend, so there was no-one on site except security personnel and fortunately no-one was hurt. The fire raged for 48 hours and 75% of Graphoprint’s production capacity was destroyed.
One of the first on the scene was Graphoprint’s office manager, Claire Raggett. Claire said: ‘It was a heartbreaking sight and we soon realised that our paper records had been destroyed. The server room was badly damaged by heat, smoke and water. Getting the system up and running again was a main priority.
‘Samarind have looked after us so well but I didn’t really expect anybody to be in on Easter Sunday morning when I phoned; I expected to be put through to an answering service or reconnected to somebody’s mobile. But one of the team, Les Veal, happened to be there and he immediately rushed round to see what he could do to help.’
Fire officers removed the servers from the wrecked building and they were put into Les’s care at Samarind. They were in a sorry state, covered in black soot which had also got sucked inside the cases. The situation didn’t look hopeful.
‘We finally got everything to Samarind by Tuesday morning,’ Claire recalls. ‘Fortunately we had a back-up, but it didn’t include three days’ worth of data – from Wednesday night to the time of the fire – and it was imperative we recovered that data. Considering the state of the servers, I thought it was an impossible task. Paperwork had been lost as well, of course. I thought we’d lost everything.’
But in less than a week – by the following Monday – Samarind had succeeded in recovering everything, bar four files which Claire was pleased to discover were old e-mail accounts and of no use, anyway. At the same time, the team had succeeded in hooking up new computers to the old lease-line in the fire-damaged building.
‘Thanks to Samarind we had computers before we had phones,’ said Claire. ‘New PCs, full network capability and all that data recovered in less than a week – it was like a miracle.
‘They worked tirelessly, even over the weekend. They were prepared to go in there, amongst all this soot and debris, dressed in white paper suits, with hard hats and dust masks, gaffer taping things here, lashing things up there and running cables across the road between Graphoprint and Samarind. The effort they put in was amazing.
‘It was a case of full disaster recovery – to carry on our business we needed that data recovered and we needed to have those computers working.
‘I love Samarind to bits – they are my saviours!’
Three months down the line, all Graphoprint’s departments are working well, with one press working full-time, a second press already being installed and two more on the way.