Education provider NCG cuts required storage capacity by 82%

NCG head of infrastructure Justin Hannan said: “It’s vital that we can access our data 24/7 – the longevity of our organisation depends on it. But the previous software was taking far too long to complete backups. We needed something faster, easier to use and more cost effective – that’s what Arcserve UDP gave us. The benefits were apparent from day one and they went beyond speed. UDP’s deduplication and compression features have allowed us to save time and money, and the reporting process is much simpler. That’s why we’re looking to extend it throughout the organisation.”

Demands on NCG’s IT infrastructure are high and data loss is not an option. The group is one of the UK’s largest skills and training providers. Made up of six divisions, with 102 locations across the country, it employs 3,000 staff, supports approximately 133,000 students and helps to organise over 23,000 apprenticeships every year.

Currently NCG needs to protect 172 TB of data including student and staff records, enrolment information and financial data. This includes Microsoft Exchange data, an SQL database and 350 virtual and physical servers.

Most of the organisation’s day-to-day operations rely on data being available 24/7 and the IT team realised that its existing disk-only data backup tool was not satisfactory from a number of angles including its ability to cope with the group’s growing volumes of data, the cost of its licence fees and consumption of IT resources. And it lacked other features NCG needed such as incremental backup capabilities.

In addition daily backups involved many members of the IT team and up to 49TB of storage space. Moreover they only offered a single report which made it impossible to get separate information for each of the six divisions. The team was also under pressure to cut costs.

The NCG IT team selected Arcserve UDP based on its ability to lower the amount of data to be protected thanks to data reduction technologies, which in turn cut the cost of licensing fees and freed up staff time. UDP’s deduplication and compression features enabled NCG to squeeze its data from 172TB to just 30TB.

Arcserve UDP also had a significant impact on the backup process, in part due to the two-pronged drop in the volumes of data being backed-up daily: firstly, thanks to deduplication and compression and, secondly, thanks to its ability to carry out incremental backups. The result has been a dramatic reduction in the backup window of 80%. Now the process only takes a few minutes for a small 40GB server, and approximately one hour for a file server holding user data.

The Arcserve solution also enables NCG to generate reports to show how much data is being backed up for each of its six divisions and how long each back up takes. The user-friendly interface provides real-time alerts for any issues arising during back ups.

NCG is now planning to extend Arcserve UDP to more servers and for offsite backup.

Arcserve Northern Europe sales director Giovanni Goduti: “It’s amazing how many organisations aren’t protecting their data smartly – reduction technologies such as deduplication and compression not only cut the amount of data you need to protect, they have financial and time saving effects too. NCG has seen that with Arcserve UDP less data to protect means less in licensing fees, it means shorter backup windows and more time to focus on other projects.”