Town of Blacksburg, VA Installs Revinetix D2D2D Backup

To improve reliability and speed backup of critical data, the Town of Blacksburg, Va., has selected the Revinetix Sentio Pro 2000 6TB Disk2Disk2Disk data protection appliance to replace its legacy tape system.

Following an extensive six-month evaluation, the disk-based Sentio was selected because of its simplicity of use, scalability and affordable price point. "The Sentio system stood out initially because of its simple, elegant and easy-to-use interface, but it was the pricing model that sealed the deal," said Steve Jones, Director of Technology for the Town of Blacksburg. "Before Revinetix, keeping up with all the licenses, the media, the hardware, verifying the tape back-ups, was difficult, time consuming and expensive. Revinetix eliminates all of this with its unique pricing model that removes server and agent licensing fees, making it a truly affordable solution."

The disk-based backup system, powered by the Revinetix operating system RevOS including data de-duplication functionality, will help the Town of Blacksburg’s IT department of three simplify data backup, archive and recovery management of its 27 Windows-based servers housed in four data centers. Additionally, Blacksburg is backing up critical non-Windows Server systems, mainly due to the licensing issues. "Now we worry about backup disk space, not licensing costs. Again, we gain confidence by performing centralized backups of infrastructure critical systems such as Linux® and non-server systems. These were not backed up on a consistent basis before Revinetix."

With its legacy tape system, backups were unreliable, it was time consuming to swap out tapes and there were many tape errors to contend with. Now, using the disk-based system, backups are fully automated, restores are quick and reliable, ensuring critical data is protected.

An additional benefit the Town of Blacksburg is realizing is the speed with which backups can now be completed. Because backing up the servers on tape took such a tremendous amount of time, due to the serial nature of tape, the back-up window had evaporated, meaning many scheduled backups were running into normal business hours, thus causing slow access to server data. Sentio provides the power to complete parallel back-ups resulting in a significant decrease in the amount of time required for data backups. All daily backups are now completed in a few hours. "This is very important for a 24X7 operation like the Town of Blacksburg," added Jones.

"As we become more reliant on data to help with our decision making it is critical that we have confidence in the reliability of our backup system," said Jones. "I’ll be honest; with the Revinetix Sentio appliance installed I’m now sleeping at night. From an IT director’s perspective, having full confidence in a data backup system is very, very comforting. Outside of IT, no one wants to hear why a data backup system is not functioning – it is assumed this stuff just works. Well, now it does which is essential for the credibility of IT."

In addition to the Town of Blacksburg, the city of Overland Park, Kansas, also relies on Revinetix backup appliances and RevOS to archive and protect the data for its local government organization.

"Daily, we work to understand the challenges and opportunities facing today’s government organizations and to provide the solutions that can help them work faster, better and optimize their constrained resources," said Thomas G. Hogan, Revinetix president and CEO. "It is rewarding that our products and our performance with other government organizations have earned the confidence of Blacksburg‚s leaders. We look forward to continuing to support them with our backup technologies to help them in preserving and protecting the data that supports city operations."