Actu
South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue brigade reduces downtime and enhances
March 2008 by Emmanuelle Lamandé
South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue brigade reduces downtime and enhances
efficiency with Yosemite. South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue is a metropolitan fire brigade, which
functions under the control of South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Authority.
Its primary role its to help the community of South Yorkshire in the
prevention and eradication of fires and the protection of the public
within its jurisdiction. It covers the county area of the South
Yorkshire region, encompassing the four districts of Barnsley,
Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.
IT is mission critical to the fire service and it underpins all the work
of the employees working within the brigade. An important aspect of the
Yorkshire based emergency service is its ability to use data and
information within its IT systems to deliver an effective service. As a
result, it is important that the fire service’s data is protected so
that if data is lost or corrupted, or a server goes down, the
information can be recovered in order to minimise downtime for the 300
strong staff.
At South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue, there is wide variety of disparate
data involved. For instance, the system contains all information that is
within Microsoft Office, important photographs that have been taken of
incidents, marketing and PR material, payroll/HR systems and recruitment
databases. The IT systems also contain important information for its
core, front line staff - its team of firefighters. For them, key
documents that are all kept on the IT systems include health and safety
manuals and procedures and dossiers on training.
In 2004, the brigade trialled Yosemite software as a new back up
solution for its large scale migration from NT servers to Microsoft 2000
and Microsoft 2003 servers. The organisation needed back up software
that was compatible with the new MS SQL server infrastructure. Local
Yorkshire based IT systems integrator, Softassure, was selected as the
IT integrator for the back up project as they provide a strong level of
service and expertise. A further reason it chose Softassure is due to
the fact the company is based in the Sheffield region so its consultants
are available 24/7 to come in and help the IT department at the fire
service as required.
With Softassure’s assistance, the South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue
Service implemented Yosemite Tapeware version 7 as stage one of its
project. It then followed it up a year later by installing the next
version of the solution - Yosemite Backup 8.5. Yosemite now provides
backup for all data at central headquarters in Sheffield supporting over
300 users.
The public sector organisation implemented the solution with one master
server so it could do the whole back up from one server and a client
license for each one of the servers being protected. The benefit for the
organisation’s IT department is that all the jobs are created on one
server and as a result it can back up different tapes in different zones
from one single source.
Implementation of the first stage was fast - it only took two weeks from
receiving the software to rolling it out. The organisation is now well
under way with stage two, which has included the installation of the
next version of the solution, which is called Yosemite Backup.
Softassure has played a key role in helping roll out both stages of the
IT solutions and the integrator is now helping the fire fighting force
to migrate to a new, advanced zone of highly efficient IT storage and
backup.
During implementation there were some major challenges in the set up of
some of the agents, especially the Oracle agent. Initially, it seemed
that the Yosemite software couldn’t detect the Oracle databases -
however this was resolved quickly by Yosemite’s strong team of technical
consultants.
The new servers have enabled data to be restored and backed up more
efficiently. Prior to moving to Yosemite, the fire service were using
windows backup software - it was slower and too basic for the
requirements of backing up Microsoft Exchange server, SQL server and
Oracle server.
The organisation deploys a 3 week rotation between Monday to Friday for
the backup of its data onto tapes. It backs up a total of 13 servers
that serve the whole of South Yorkshire. Everything gets backed up the
same time. It is the tape drives themselves that back up data more
quickly but the Yosemite software is the enabler of this speeded up
service.
South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue has only had to restore one primary
controller after it went down. They restored the data onto a new server.
It took the best part of a day to get the information back. When they
restored it they had to input the data from the tape. Without the back
up they would have lost the information on the server when it crashed
due to a hardware fault. Yosemite did its job well and provided the
safety net for them to run their business.
