Outwood Grange Academies Trust Deploys Arcserve UDP

Arcserve, LLC, a provider of data protection and recovery software and services, announced that its Unified Data Protection (UDP) software has helped education provider Outwood Grange Academies Trust (OGAT) cut its backup window from 48 hours to just one (just under 98%), has lowered the amount of required secondary storage from 3TB to 900GB each month, and reduced a total of 80TB of raw data by 65% to just 28TB before backup.

In addition, thanks to UDP, OGAT can restore a server in 20 minutes and an entire school’s IT infrastructure in 48 hours. Added to this, OGAT has achieved 70% savings compared to competing tools, thanks to Arcserve UDP’s flexible licensing model.

OGAT has 10,000 students and 2,500 members of staff. It began as one academy and over the past ten years its success has brought additional schools under its umbrella. Each school came with its own IT system: IT director Stuart Jones found he and his team were contending with 19 academies with different backup tools, disparate data retention policies, mixed storage media, and countless different approaches to DR. The IT Systems are vital for the day-to-day running of the academies: covering everything from pay-roll to medical notes. Teachers also use the IT system for classes and lesson plans.

OGAT centrally monitors every academies backup process, but there was no automatic report process – the only way to verify was to contact the sites and ask to see the backup log. With this complex setup, it was hard to check that backups were successfully completed and that data retention times were correct.

OGAT deployed UDP to all 19 of its secondary academies in Northern England where it backups 234 servers – 52 physical and 182 virtual – and 80TB of data. Its enhanced data protection strategy mans that OGAT has capacity to keep data for longer, and that its IT team are sure that backups have successfully taken place across the large IT estate. UDP’s flexible licensing will enable OGAT to scale up the software as more academies are added to its family of schools. It already has plans to extend the solution to its remaining five institutions.

OGAT IT director Stuart Jones said: “We tested four solutions before choosing Arcserve UDP. It proved the strongest because of its data deduplication technologies and was easy to use – Arcserve UDP is what we’d term ‘set it and forget it:’ you install it and that’s it. We’ve recently added three new schools and we deployed three Arcserve UDP servers in just one day.“

Arcserve Northern Europe sales director Giovanni Goduti said: “When you’re handling IT for 19 different academies, you really don’t want to worry that backups haven’t worked, and you don’t want to spend days or weeks restoring a server. By compressing and deduplicating OGAT’s data, and by rationalising its reporting system, we’ve been able to speed up its backups, make them more reliable and give the IT team the opportunity to keep data for longer: taking away the worry and freeing up time to work on other parts of the IT Infrastructure.“

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