UK Wolverhampton City Council With BakBone

BakBone Software Inc. announced that Wolverhampton City Council has streamlined its data protection strategy by consolidating eight backup and recovery solutions into one with BakBone NetVault: Backup. As a result, the local authority significantly reduced the support, administration and maintenance costs of its data protection infrastructure. BakBone NetVault: Backup now protects 24TB of data for Wolverhampton City Council.

The Wolverhampton City Council

The Wolverhampton City Council counts approximately 237,000 residents, served by over 12,000 employees spread across 500+ offices, around 200 of which are networked. The local authority’s ICT department provides all IT and communications services, such as corporate and departmental applications, business continuity and disaster recovery through two primary data centres and a number of POP sites.

"With users spread across so many physical locations and several backup and recovery solutions to manage, providing the appropriate level of storage availability and performance at an affordable cost was a challenge," said Matthew Jeavons, infrastructure architect, Wolverhampton City Council. "We wanted to increase efficiency and this called for a more streamlined data protection infrastructure. BakBone NetVault: Backup allowed us to effectively protect all our data from one single point of management, deploy a cross-site disaster recovery strategy and maximise our storage capacity."

Wolverhampton City Council relies on a combination of filers, arrays and tape libraries running Fibre Channel, iSCSI and CIFS. IP asynchronous replication between the sites gives the council enhanced levels of data protection. For server-centric and firewall-secured servers NetVault: Backup provides the primary backup and recovery mechanism over IP, initially to a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) and then to an LTO3 tape library.

"Today organisations need to be able to provide their users with reliable, fast access to information, and data loss is not an option," said Chris Ross, vice president of EMEA, BakBone. "Wolverhampton City Council provides its residents with a number of services and their delivery relies on the organisation’s IT infrastructure. In addition, like other local government departments, it is subject to legislation that calls for data to be stored for specific periods of time. A streamlined, reliable and efficient data protection strategy was pivotal to effectively run the organisation."

After evaluating a number of options, Wolverhampton City Council opted for BakBone’s NetVault: Backup solution from storage integrator B2net, because of important functionality, such as the solution’s NDMP capabilities and VaultDR. Over the coming months, the local authority’s IT department will deploy BakBone’s scalable data protection software to all the servers in the network.

"Our customers’ IT departments often tend to be under significant pressure to address any new issues such as data protection and data availability while continuing to provide existing services and without increasing headcount," said Dave Hallam, Account Manager at B2net. "Because of its feature set, affordability and user-friendliness BakBone’s NetVault: Backup was an ideal fit for Wolverhampton City Council, and we are pleased to have helped the team improve its data protection strategy without adding complexity or unnecessary costs."