Gaston County Schools Chooses STORServer for Reliable Data Protection that Saves Time and Conserves Resources
Overview
Gaston County Schools is a medium-sized school district of 54 schools serving 33,000 students.
The school district is located just west of Charlotte N.C. about 200 miles from the Atlantic Coast. The district backs up 76 servers containing administrative data, text files, video files, and images. They backup about 87GB of changed data per day. That amount of data changes during busy times of the school year and can increase significantly from the 87GB reported.
The Challenge:
The school district was using ArcServ as their backup solution prior to STORServer. The customer was unhappy because the previous solution was very labor-intensive. In fact, the previous backup system required a full-time employee but the STORServer Enterprise Backup Appliance (EBA) requires only about 5% of one administrator’s time.
Gaston County is located in an area that is subject to frequent thunderstorms, power outages, and faces a potential danger from hurricane damage.
The backup administrator, Patricia Pruitt, was in desperate need of a backup solution that was easy-to-use and dependable.
The Solution:
Gaston County purchased their first STORServer Enterprise Backup Appliance (EBA) in order to address the complicated use and questionable reliability of their old backup system. Since then, they have upgraded and eventually outgrown and replaced their STORServer EBA with an even bigger and better Enterprise Backup Appliance. Their original STORServer EBA was well over five years old and had simply been outgrown.
Currently, their EBA is configured for a custom mix of disk-to-disk-to-tape technology. Pruitt spends only about 5% of her time managing all the backups.
Results:
According to Pruitt, the STORServer installation “went very smoothly. In fact, we were way ahead of the time that had been scheduled and we used the extra time for some extra training from the STORServer consultant.”
The STORServer EBA solution has made managing the backups faster, easier, and more reliable than the previous system and Pruitt loves the STORServer technical support she receives saying,
“The support I’ve received from STORServer has always been excellent! If I don’t have time to work a problem, I can just ask them to remote into the system and they fix the problem!”
