Latin School of Chicago Opts for BakBone

BakBone Software, Inc. is providing VMware and heterogeneous data protection solutions for The Latin School of Chicago, helping the school keep its focus on students, rather than data protection. An independent, coeducational day school located on the Near North Side of Chicago, The Latin School of Chicago ranks among the nation’s best schools in the informed use of technology in the classroom and for school administration. They utilize technology to support efficient, reliable operation of the school and provide tools that enhance both internal and external communications.

The Latin School of Chicago uses BakBone NetVault: Backup to protect more than 80 servers with 10 TB of data across a network that includes two libraries, a cafe, a student store, the development office, accounting, payroll and finance. "We are not shy about embracing new technologies like virtualization and leveraging multiple operating systems, including Linux," said Shandor Simon, director of Networking Services, The Latin School of Chicago. "We needed a dependable backup solution that could support Linux, Windows and Mac OS that complemented our current backup process and could scale to meet our school’s growing demands. We found our answer with BakBone." With more than 1,000 students, 250 teachers and staff and close to 700 desktop machines, The Latin School’s data is doubling annually.

"As we were going through our backup requirements, we realized that our criteria was more difficult to meet than originally thought," said Simon. "We wanted a solution that is easy to use, reliable and supports our current infrastructure, and NetVault: Backup was flexible enough to work with our existing processes. We needed backup to be our safety net."

To manage the school’s growing data, Latin School also embraced BakBone’s virtualization, VTL and reporting tools to significantly cut backup administration time and improve the efficiency and reliability of their backups. BakBone’s solution protects mission-critical data stored on VMware ESX servers and helps the school leverage virtual libraries from physical disk storage from a single, centralized domain console without network downtime.

The school’s prior data protection system took three to four hours daily to manage and when the catalogs got corrupted, they required lengthy rebuilds. In addition, the school constantly struggled with being unable to complete backups inside their eight-hour window. With NetVault: Backup, the school easily meets backup window requirements and data recoveries are painless. According to Simon, "When we switched to BakBone, the conversion was fast and the improvement was dramatic and immediate. We got NetVault: Backup up and running in under a week – a very short timetable. We even use fewer new tapes weekly."

"NetVault: Backup was selected by The Latin School because it provides enterprise-class data protection for their complex heterogeneous environments," said Jeff Drescher, vice president of Marketing, BakBone. "NetVault: Backup is flexible, delivering proven reliability and high-performance with an unmatched combination of features designed to meet the current and future data protection needs of The Latin School."