Case Study: Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board
EVault Online Backup and Recovery Makes the Grade for Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board
Located in Ontario, Canada, the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board serves some 30,000 students and 2,500 teachers in its 53 elementary and seven secondary schools. One of its objectives is to support students and teachers through information technology and computers in the classroom.
Within the district, computer technology is used to deliver curriculum-driven content, and to enhance the educational process. Every student has an account and login, which enables them to use computers to complete assignments such as reports and presentations.
To manage the more than nine terabytes of information on its servers, the school district recently graduated to online data backup from EVault, the trusted experts of secure online backup, recovery and archiving solutions.
Prior to EVault, Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board used an "old school" manual tape drive system for data backup. Every location backed up data to tape and a designated school representative was responsible for changing tapes daily -- an operation that proved to be unreliable by its very nature. "Relying on personnel to initiate data backup was somewhat hit or miss; if someone forgot to put in a tape, the data would be subject to loss," said Mark Straka, Technical Systems Analyst, Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board.
"We started looking at centralized backup options; another educational institution in the area was looking at adopting EVault's online backup solution, and we thought it might make sense for us as well," said Straka.
EVault worked with Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board to set up a pilot program to enable the district to test-drive the solution. Straka, who has worked in the IT space for nearly 20 years, says he was somewhat wary of initial promises made by EVault.
"They laid out all the features, capabilities and benefits and said 'this is what it's going to do for you.' And I thought that A) they're either very confident in their product, or B) they're selling me a bridge," Straka recalls.
But Straka's skepticism was soon put to rest. "We evaluated EVault's technology and put it through its paces, and we were very impressed," he said. "Not only were we able to streamline our data backup operations, we saw backup times decrease extensively. When we considered the high cost associated with tape backup both financially and from a risk perspective, it brought everything home. It seemed unthinkable not to switch to EVault."
Centralized Backup
Today, thanks to EVault, data backups for every school are conducted automatically, efficiently, and remotely from the school districts' administrative headquarters. Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board is able to leverage its existing infrastructure and Internet connections to reliably backup and transfer data securely and easily. The district conducts two full backups per evening to two separate vaults. This dual vault scenario provides an extra measure of security, should one server go down.
EVault's online backup technology enables Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board to virtually eliminate its backup window. Thanks to EVault DeltaPro™, EVault's advanced compression and delta processing technology, EVault is 200 times more efficient in storage usage than tape. This technology significantly reduces the amount of data required for transmission to a backup server or array, while still enabling a full restore from any point in time.
By reducing the amounts of data required for transmission, storage volumes on the backup server or array grow slower so additional disk space is required less frequently. Hamilton- Wentworth Catholic District School Board’s nine terabytes of restorable data takes up only 45GB on their servers.
The data is easily accessible from anywhere via an Internet connection in time of need. Straka says they have had reason to test EVault's data restoration capabilities from time to time. Having conducted a bare metal restore, Straka characterizes the process as "perfect" and says that using EVault, he's been able to rebuild a file server in four hours.
When comparing the cost of EVault online backup versus the district's previous manual tape-based system, Straka considers the overall improvement in manageability and dual redundancy that EVault delivers to be a tremendous value add.
Straka also sees EVault’s customer support as a bonus. "The support is fantastic -- EVault representatives are professional, courteous and consistent. They are very knowledgeable; there are no problems that go unresolved or questions that go unanswered."
But perhaps the most important benefit Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board has realized is that they are no longer strapped with the onus of having to juggle backup tapes, freeing up personnel to focus on the very important business of teaching. Overall, Straka thinks EVault gets good marks all around. "It's one of the few products I'm confident in recommending to colleagues."
