Shepway District Council Enhances Data Protection With BakBone

BakBone Software, Inc. is maintaining a strong customer presence in the public sector with the addition of Shepway District Council to its customer base. The local government department recently installed NetVault: Backup to deploy a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) strategy and protect ten terabytes of data each week. BakBone Platinum Partner NCE Computer Group Ltd. was instrumental to the deal.

With more than 500 employees and 70 servers, Shepway District Council relies on a very different IT infrastructure than it did a few years ago. The agency’s incumbent backup process no longer met the demands of the new organisation and the volume of data its staff generates daily.

"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," said Steve Makin, ICT network services manager, Shepway District Council. "We evaluated various bidders and selected BakBone’s NetVault: Backup because it ticked all the boxes: scalability, ease of use and price. The positive recommendations we got from existing users gave us the extra peace of mind."

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

"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," said Chris Ross, vice president of EMEA, BakBone. "One of the priorities for the council’s IT staff was to ensure the data was suitable, protected with a reliable and user-friendly backup solution, and the team was looking for first-class technical support. BakBone met all these requirements."

Thanks to BakBone NetVault: Backup, Shepway District Council has been able to deploy an enterprise-level, corporate-wide data protection solution at a reasonable cost, ensuring its data is backed up and can easily be restored in case of data loss.

Steve Makin continues, "The previous solution suited our needs before the server farm grew, but as data was sent directly to tape when backup time windows got shorter, this set up became ineffective. With BakBone NetVault: Backup we now have a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) strategy that has considerably 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."

"We work very closely with all our 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," said John Greenwood, product sales director, NCE. "We have been working with Shepway District Council for a number of years and we knew that BakBone NetVault: Backup was the ideal solution to take this customer’s data protection strategy to the next level."