The IT team at Great Lakes Council in New South Wales breathed a collective sigh of relief recently when their fallback backup system restored the drive in a crashed server within three minutes.
Council’s HP DL360 server was involved in a project moving data to a new System Area Network. A prerequisite of moving the data required several updates to the server’s firmware and Windows 2003 software.
Prior to beginning the upgrade, Network Coordinator, Gerry Locke, completed a disk based backup using StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect and a one terabyte USB drive. As there were a number of updates to be completed, it was necessary to reboot the server several times.
After one of these updates, the server went into a constant reboot loop indicating that there might be a hardware fault.
After trying several different options working late into the night, Council’s Manager Information Technology, Sharon McMeeken, decided to review the problem in the morning.
Next day, when the IT staff reviewed the processes completed the night before without joy, a call was placed with StorageCraft to see if they could help in the restoration process.
“Using StorageCraft ShadowProtect, we had the server up and running within three minutes of identifying the initial problem, restoring it to the exact state of our last ShadowProtect backup,” Gerry Locke said. “I hate to think what would have happened otherwise,
the server rebuild would probably have taken up to two days.
“We saved a great deal of downtime and potential user problems.”
Great Lakes Council traditionally uses a tape based backup system for day to day data backups. In 2007, it also implemented the ShadowProtect disk based real time recovery solution for an Image Repository for mission critical servers, backing up to a one terabyte USB drive. Council also use the IT Edition of ShadowProtect on workstations for high end users, so they can run an independent backup of their systems when required.
“ShadowProtect is a key element in Great Lakes’ data protection procedures,” Sharon McMeeken said. “Its speed is quite amazing for both backing up and restoring, and the quality of support is also exceptional. This is paramount when you are experiencing critical issues, and also in a remote location.”
According to Gerry Locke, ShadowProtect’s benefits are speed, ease of use, and the ability to cart it around and use it wherever it’s needed. He said the product offers peace of mind as a backup solution in case Council’s tape based backup solution goes haywire.
For further information contact Sharon McMeeken or Gerry Locke at Great Lakes Council on (02) 6591 7222.
