Case Studies
Case Studies

Backup Software

EVault Protect helps California Dept. of Mental Health optimize its backup and recovery process

EVault's backup software solution was the right choice for the California Dept. of Mental Health.

As manager of network services for the California Department of Mental Health (DMH), Mary Jo Wyckoff faces a host of data backup and recovery issues very similar to those experienced in the private sector. Growing data. Growing complexity. No budget to hire more people.

In supporting approximately 400 employees at their Sacramento headquarters as well as seven state hospitals within the state, Wyckoff and her team are responsible for maintaining network availability and data integrity of about 500GB across 50 servers, which run a variety of office applications.

Tape not answering growing complexity

Previously, as a Novell-only shop, DMH used Computer Associates ArcServe for its server backup and recovery. Backup tapes were kept for about a week before they were shipped to off-site storage. When new servers were installed as part of an eventual migration toward Microsoft Windows, the IT group started experiencing backup-related complications.

"The old backup and recovery process then truly became a workload. There just was always an issue, which made it really frustrating," recalls Wyckoff. "We had problems with backups not finishing, with unsuccessful restore attempts and getting error messages and not being able to figure out why."

The network services staff was not in the business of backup; however, it increasingly became the primary duty for some of her staff. When looking at the other necessary duties on their plate, Wyckoff knew something had to give.

"The state of California remains in a hiring freeze, so I knew I was not going to be able to bring in more people to manage our backups. A different tape solution was not going to fix the problem," says Wyckoff. "We needed to dramatically reduce the amount of time spent on managing the backup process, and ensure the integrity and availability of our data."

With the assistance of its government integrator, Entisys Solutions, DMH turned to EVault as an online, disk-to-disk alternative to tape. As they factored in the hiring freeze, growing data volumes and the ongoing server migration project, DMH believed they would see a greater return on investment by outsourcing the backup and recovery tasks with the deployment of EVault Protect.

By supporting both NetWare and Windows, the EVault Protect online backup and recovery service automated and centralized the backup management of all 50 of the DMH's servers. By leveraging the service's EVault DeltaPro™ technology, the department was able to leverage existing network bandwidth and securely transfer the data off-site to an EVault-managed, Tier 1 data center.

With EVault DeltaPro, at pre-determined times set by DMH staff, software agents installed on the servers "wake up" and scan for files created or altered since the last backup. Those new or changed blocks of data are then compressed and encrypted before it is transmitted from the DMH network over the Internet to the data center. By processing only new or changed files, combined with standard compression, data volumes can be reduced by more than 90 percent, which alleviates any potential burden on network bandwidth.

Wyckoff and her IT group were most impressed by the reliability and ease of using EVault Protect. Backup tasks that once created considerable stress and ate up hours of manpower resources each day could now be managed in 30 minutes. Under the old backup scheme, tapes that were more than a week old were stored off-site. An outsourced, online backup service with EVault DeltaPro technology afforded them the ability to keep much older copies online, readily accessible in just a couple of mouse-clicks. Recovering that critical file from two months back was no longer the time-intensive process of rummaging for backup tapes, finding and mounting the tape and hopefully having a piece of media in good enough condition to read the file.

Time to pursue other strategic initiatives

With a significant data backup problem now alleviated, the DMH staff was able free up its modest resources for other critical technology-related initiatives, such as HIPAA-related projects. Staff was able to improve its network intrusion, firewalls and Web monitoring. In addition to its headquarters, EVault Protect is deployed at two state hospitals. In the next 18 months, Wyckoff plans to add EVault online backup and recovery to five additional hospitals statewide.

Discover more about EVault software and services:

Resource Library