Topio, (http://www.topio.com), the leading provider of enterprise software for data replication and recovery, today announced that Hanson Brick & Tile, North America's largest brick manufacturer, a part of Hanson PLC one of the world’s leading heavy building materials companies, has chosen Topio’s TDPS (Topio Data Protection Suite) as its long-distance disaster recovery solution.

TDPS provided Hanson Brick & Tile the ability to continuously replicate data from both UNIX and Windows systems in Morrisville N.C to their recovery centre in Irving, Texas. At the Hanson recovery site TDPS maintains the current, recovery-ready image of Hanson’s ERP data, ensuring application recovery in minutes--Allowing Hanson to exceed their aggressive disaster recovery objectives.

“Hanson is consolidating IT support for seven acquired companies,” said Jimmie Marks, Hanson’s Director of Corporate IT. “When we assessed our application portfolio in this context, we determined that the impact of a prolonged outage was significantly greater for some applications, particularly ERP.”

“We have 31 sales, manufacturing and distribution locations spread across the United States that depend on ready access to the ERP applications we run in our corporate data centre,” continued Marks. “In the event of a disaster, we can’t afford to have our systems down for more than 1 hour at the most. The Building Materials Industry is a highly competitive business; customer service is key. If we lose processing capability in Morrisville we lose our ability to promise inventory to customers and to ship orders in a timely fashion. In short we lose customers. With the Topio solution, we have achieved our recovery objectives, and in most cases, we beat them,” said Marks.

Hanson’s current initiative was driven by Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) compliance. The management team wanted to ensure that Hanson included disaster recovery as an integral part of the SOX plan. In addition to addressing their immediate need for ERP recovery Hanson needed a solution flexible enough to support new platforms as their disaster recovery plan evolved.

“As part of our overall plan we define recovery objectives for each of our key applications. We were looking for a solution that would work across the breadth of our infrastructure,” said Marks. “Not only does TDPS work transparently with our existing high-availability systems, Topio gives us the flexibility to use the same solution for other platforms and applications as we expand our initiative. This will save us time and money.”

About TDPS
The Topio Data Protection Suite™ (TDPS) enables enterprises of all sizes to continuously copy and protect their data over any distance, across heterogeneous infrastructure, without the operational disruption incurred through traditional alternatives. During production fail-over, Topio enables rapid recovery of an up-to-the-second image of the business that is 100% consistent with production data. TDPS works seamlessly with in-place or evolving network and IT infrastructure, protecting companies’ current investments, and giving them the flexibility to match the most cost-effective technology with current, and future, needs.

About Hanson Brick & Tile (http://www.hansonbrick.com) Hanson Brick & Tile is North America's largest brick manufacturer, with 2,000 employees and operations across the United States and Canada. The company provides its customers with superior selection and service, offering five regional brick collections that include more than 1,000 styles of brick. Hanson Brick & Tile is based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hanson Brick & Tile is part of Hanson PLC (NYSE:HAN), an international building materials company, with more than 28,000 employees and operations in 17 countries. Hanson PLC is the largest producer of aggregates, the second largest producer of pipe and the third largest producer of brick in the world.

About Topio go to http://www.topio.com