Spartanburg School District #2 chooses a STORServer Enterprise Backup Appliance for its “ease of use” and time-saving features.
Spartanburg School District #2 is a medium-sized school district of 14 schools located in Boiling Springs South Carolina, approximately 240 miles from the Atlantic coast. The IT environment requires the backup of servers at all 14 remote schools as well as the data center servers handling all aspects of district business (finance, transportation, administration, human resources, maintenance, etc.). The center requires about 25GB of data to be backed up nightly. The data exists in the form of SQL databases, Oracle databases, text files, images, and video. Spartanburg’s inland location usually protects it from being hit directly from Atlantic hurricanes, though it often receives heavy rains due to passing tropical systems. They also face the same disaster scenarios that most centers face in terms of the potential for fire or inadvertently-deleted or corrupted data.
The Challenge:
Troy Moore of Spartanburg School District #2 faced the daunting task of having local non-IT-trained personnel perform the daily backup of all the servers located in schools throughout the district. Each and every school required someone onsite to insert and checkout tapes on schedule, manually start backup programs, clean tape drives, and perform other tasks that could not be handled remotely by IT staff. The backups were often neglected or forgotten as a result and the reliability and integrity of the backup and disaster recovery capability were badly compromised. Data was being lost and a solution was needed that could address these issues.
The Solution:
STORServer’s line of Enterprise Backup Appliances offers complete backup, disaster recovery, archiving, data protection, and lifecycle management solutions housed in one box. The STORServer Enterprise Backup Appliance (EBA) includes the hardware, software, server, tape library, disks, and training that customers need and comes ready to plug-in. Spartanburg School District #2 installed a STORServer EBA, replacing the local tape drive methodology and Veritas software previously employed. The EBA eliminated the need for individual backups at each of the school sites. Now, all of the servers are backed up directly to the STORServer EBA, making backups simple, automated, and reliable. Next, they upgraded in order to obtain more capacity. Moore says that the STORServer solution was chosen and renewed because it is a centralized solution that allows the administrator to manage all of the backups from a single location, eliminating all of the problems created by the previous process.
Results:
The STORServer EBA usually installs in just 2 or 3 days, eliminating the arduous process most IT managers are familiar with. Moore describes the STORServer EBA implementation process saying, “It was seamless. The guy comes out and just gets it rollin’.” He adds, “We get all of our backups now. It is done. And when they’ve lost something…, we can always get it back*.”
“It was seamless. The guy comes out and just gets it rollin’.”
Troy Moore, Spartanburg School District #2
Moore also points out that they haven’t actually calculated the savings realized by the use of their STORServer EBA but points out that there is a lot less time used to manage backups. The solution only needs about five minutes a day to manage. STORServer support has also been a tremendous benefit for the school district. Moore says, “It’s been great! I’ve never had a problem with it!”
What is best about having a STORServer EBA? Moore says that it’s “Ease of use. I’m serious. I come in and see what needs to be checked out. I do it and then go do something else.”
*One teacher in the district was working for over a year toward getting a national certification. Obtaining this certification increases a teachers’ salary by $10,000 per year. Somehow, she lost an entire years’ worth of data and came to Troy, asking if there was any way that the data could be restored. The teacher was able to tell Troy when she last accessed the data and from this clue, he was able to restore all but the last week or so very quickly and easily. The teacher was able to re-create the missing week and obtained her certification. This incident was obviously good for the teacher but it was also good for the IT Department since Troy was able to restore the data and it was good for the school district because they now have another nationally certified teacher which they would not if the data had been permanently lost.
