NCE shows Shepway the way

Mountains of data: Shepway Council produces 10TB of data a week

BakBone Platinum partner NCE has upgraded Shepway District Council's ageing backup system.

The VAR implemented BakBone's Netvault: Backup - a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) strategy to protect hte 10TBs of data produced by the council's 500 employees and 70 servers on a weekly basis.

Chris Ross, vice president of EMEA, BakBone, said: “Just like many organisations, the Shepway District Council had a sound IT infrastructure that was no longer a match for the increased demands the business was placing on it because of unforeseen growth.”

The current storage infrastructure, at the company, includes a storage area network (SAN) where the backups to tape take place via a separate non-production area of this SAN.

John Greenwood, product sales director at NCE, said: “NCE has been working with Shepway District Council for a number of years and knew that BakBone NetVault: Backup was the ideal solution to take this customer’s data protection strategy to the next level.

“NCE work very closely with all its customers because every single one of them has a distinct set of requirements depending on factors such as OS environment, 24/7 operations, presence of remote offices and budget.”

Steve Makin, ICT network services manager at Shepway District Council, said: “The legacy backup software could not scale to protect the increasing number of servers, and so we started looking for a solution that could easily cope with growth in a mixed Windows/Unix environment, while keeping costs down.”

He continued: “With BakBone NetVault: Backup we now have a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) strategy that has improved backup times. Moving away from well established systems, especially for something as critical as data backup, can sometimes be daunting, but throughout the whole process we have found the support from the team at BakBone to be excellent.”