Juan Diego Catholic HS Replaces Tape

To streamline its data storage process for its more than 455 networked Apple Mac computers, Juan Diego Catholic High School has replaced its tape backup system with a RAID hard drive backup system from Revinetix, a data backup and recovery systems provider.

Juan Diego Catholic High School, a 57 acre private institution located in Draper, a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah

“We’ve anticipated the growing demand for backup solutions that address the unique needs of Mac computer systems,” said Revinetix president and CEO Thomas Hogan  “The Revinetix product is designed to support Mac systems, and works very well in this particular application.  We’re actively developing new technologies that serve evolving Apple Mac data protection requirements.”

Prior to switching to the RAID pure disk-based system, Juan Diego High School had purchased an $8,000 hybrid disk/tape system via three vendors that proved extremely slow and oftentimes just didn’t work.

“The biggest issue was that we didn’t have a backup we could count on,” said Jim Duane, Skaggs Catholic Center Director of Technology. “Not only did the backup take an inordinate amount of time – it would chug all day and night to get it on tape, it would regularly stall out and the backup would not be completed.”

Its new RAID disk-based system has capacity to store 1.5 terabytes of compressed data and they regularly archive 680+ gigabytes of compressed data each month. Juan Diego also purchased three off-site archive drives with 1 terabyte of storage capacity each.

“Out of the box, the storage capacity we had with the Revinetix system was much larger than what was available with tape,” said Duane.

The system has been installed now for a couple of months. The time savings with the RAID hard drive, disk backup system has been tremendous. Since the switch from tape to disk, the time to complete the daily backups has been reduced by 80 percent.

“Now our backups just work,” said Duane. “Since installing the Revinetix disk backup system we have had no problems. Our nightly back up that took all night – when it did work – now takes only two to three hours a night.”

Tasks for Duane have also been significantly streamlined and simplified with the new RAID system. Backups are scheduled to run daily and the entire process is automated. Another time saver was being able to switch from needing to complete a weekly archive with the legacy tape system to now archiving on a monthly basis.

“We now have three months of solid backup on disk of all mission critical data versus a subset of that data on six weeks worth of fragile tapes, “ says Eric Browning, Skaggs Catholic Center Systems Administrator.