Saving storage time

Arcserve's Unified Data Protection (UDP) software has helped university Falmouth Exeter Plus (FX Plus) to cut data backup times by 66 per cent – despite data volumes increasing by 33 per cent. Through UDP, this customer can ensure the availability and automated backup of 27TB of academic and operational data spread across 150 virtual and 20 physical servers. It can also spin up a virtual server in less than 30 minutes and restore any system from scratch in less than half a day.

FX Plus delivers shared higher education services and facilities for the University of Exeter and Falmouth. Its Penryn campus in Cornwall is used by more than 5,500 students and 1,200 faculty and support staff. Its IT systems are shared by both universities, each having different backup requirements.

Before implementing Arcserve UDP, FX Plus was backing up to tape and both backup and recovery processes were slow. The IT team would manually filter through a whole server to find a single item to restore. Weekend backups would run into Monday morning, impacting the performance of email and file servers and hence user experience. As data volumes increased, and virtualisation was added to the mix, the team knew they needed an adaptable, scalable solution.

FX Plus selected Arcserve UDP after extensive research. The benefits brought by the Arcserve solution don’t end with the accelerated backup speeds; recovery management is simplified and lost files can be found without filtering each server. Data now moves seamlessly to virtual servers. Dashboards show every department’s backup needs. And a self-service restore function means that staff and students can recover their own files.

The Arcserve team implemented UDP in just four days. Today it protects SQL Server and Oracle databases, 5,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and Active Directory accounts, operational systems (including HR, finance and accounting systems, and the student database) and a 5TB file store.

Every weekend Arcserve UDP automatically backs up the entire IT estate, while incremental backups are run Monday to Friday. Once completed, backups are automatically replicated to a storage area network in a separate building.

Nathan Prisk, FX Plus Head of Technology and Innovation, said: “We had to find something new – and what we’ve got from Arcserve is so much more than faster recovery. Our backup processes are tailored to the demands of our systems. We can see where the data is coming from. And we’re confident that Arcserve will meet our backup and recovery management needs long into the future.”

Giovanni Goduti, Arcserve sales director Northern Europe, said: “Backup and recovery should be pain-free. No one wants to start their Monday morning waiting for a weekend backup to finish, and manually sifting through hundreds of servers for a single item is just a waste of time. We’ve worked closely with FX Plus to understand what it really needs – and Arcserve UDP has helped to achieve it.”