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Dorset County Council Ensures Remote Site Recovery with EVault
August 2008 by Marc Jacob Phil Evans, Vice President of Sales Northern Europe at EVault
Dorset County in the South West of the UK is renowned for its stunning coastline and beautiful countryside, captured in the works of writer Thomas Hardy. Local government in Dorset is divided into six district or borough councils, two unitary authorities - responsible for local government in the towns of Poole and Bournemouth - and the Dorset County Council (CC).
The Dorset CC provides education, social care and health services, highways management, trading standards, and local services such as libraries for all of Dorset. These require a significant level of administration, and Dorset CC also provides IT support to many of the satellite sites that are at the frontline of service delivery.
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“Data volumes were increasing of course, but our two main problems were the time it was taking to back up to tape and the fact that many of our remote sites had their own tape backup systems but were often recording over the same tape every day - making recovery of information older than 24 hours impossible,” says Gary Phipps, ICT Analyst at Dorset County Council.
At the time Dorset was relying on tape storage, and backup windows were becoming so large that they impinged on normal business activity. Remote sites relied on IT support and admin from Dorset County Council’s IT team based in Dorchester to some extent, but many had their own tape systems. Unfortunately, without onsite IT support these tapes were not managed and changed regularly.
“We wanted to move to a centrally managed disk-to-disk backup solution, both to improve our data management capabilities and processes, and also for long term cost reasons. Disk backup is faster and more cost-effective than tape storage for what we required,” explains Phipps.
Dorset’s team considered several options and as part of the process invited EVault partner 2e2 a leading value-added reseller specialising in storage management, in to meet them.
“The EVault technology was the deciding factor, and the online capability offered a very cost-effective way of tackling the issuing of backing up data from our remote sites,” says Phipps. “Added to this, 2e2 has local offices and a strong track record in data management solutions, and after considering many options we felt the EVault system was the best solution for us.”
Dorset, supported by 2e2 and EVault, installed a vault (server) for storage of the data and the EVault InfoStage® online backup software at the Dorchester central offices.
Phipps continues: “Originally we planned on putting 30 to 35 of our servers onto the EVault InfoStage system to backup to the vault, but it proved really successful. Now we have 67 servers on the system. Everything including mail servers, Oracle servers, Notes and Excel files are being backed up using EVault InfoStage.”
With this increase in servers being backed up to disk using Evault InfoStage, a second vault has been installed at one of the County Council’s sites in the North of the county. Already between seven and seven-and-a-half terabytes are stored on the larger vault using Evault InfoStage.
EVault InfoStage is the only true online backup software that allows you to design your own evaulting infrastructure using your existing hardware, facilities, and bandwidth. Designed for the best performance, with the highest security, while meeting your deployment requirements, EVault InfoStage augments your disaster recovery plans and expedites your return to operations (RTO).
