Backup solutions provider Unitrends has successfully completed its installation of new Recovery-Series appliances at the Manukau Institute of Technology (MIT), a move which has received Grade A Institute backing.
Working closely with partners Connector Systems and Base 2 in New Zealand, the backup and recovery experts met the ongoing demands of MIT, a university which delivers a range of academic qualifications from certificate to degree level to 20,000 students, including 1,000 international students, each year.
Operating a mixed physical and virtual environment, encompassing Windows, Linux, OS X, and Solaris-based servers, the Institute runs approximately 1,500 backup jobs each night, covering all staff and student files, over Sun Infrastructure and an LTO4 tape library with a capacity of 500 tapes.
They also operated a diskto-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) schedule, which included a daily differential copy, a weekly copy, and a month-end backup on selected servers.
“Due to the magnitude of data [35+ TB], and a lack of disk-based storage, we experienced issues completing backups in a timely manner,” says Russell Smith, Systems Manager, ICTS.
“This meant our ICTS team had to spend more time ensuring our incumbent backup solution was operational, and less time focusing on their day-to-day tasks.”
Additionally, due to a growth in stored data, tape had to be used as an overflow for backups.
Due to the volume of backups required and the capacity/performance of the current infrastructure, MIT continually had to manage backups on a day-by-day basis.
Local expertise…
Faced with the decision whether to renew its current backup solution license and upgrade its hardware, MIT MIT turned to Base 2, a New Zealand-based technology solution provider, who together with local IT distributor Connector Systems provided a joint RFP response recommending Unitrends.
Moving forward with Unitrends based on an instant recovery solution that allows full system recovery in less than five minutes, Smith says MIT were up and running on their new backup appliances within three months.
“The Unitrends solution has provided the required certainty around our backup requirements and also met the other criteria of the business case—improved performance, improved service, cost reduction, and improved functionality,” he says.
“Our previous backup solution was accessed through a Java client, which wasn’t very convenient.
“Each time there was an upgrade on the backup server, we had to upgrade our clients as well, so if our primary backup administrator was away, restores could be delayed while we organised the right versions of Java and the client, etc.
“Unitrends has a standard HTML web interface which takes all of these issues away.”
According to Smith, MIT is just beginning to fully explore the additional functionality of its Unitrends solution in terms of disaster recovery, business continuity, and cloud connectivity as the Institute embarks on another busy year in 2015.
