Oregon School Districts Graduate to Remote Data Backup

EMC Corporation announced that Clackamas Education Service District (ESD), a state-funded agency providing centralized educational programs and services, has introduced remote data backup services to 10 school districts in Clackamas County, Oregon.

"We provide schools and local agencies with services that may not be affordable on an individual basis, but become more feasible when the cost is shared," said Gary Scheel, Network Services Coordinator, Clackamas ESD. "One application that benefits from this model is remote data backup. As schools accumulate more data and put additional functions online, there is growing need for a high-quality backup solution and backing up to tape or CD is no longer reliable or efficient enough."

Working with EMC Global Services to design and implement an EMC information infrastructure for its remote data backup service, Clackamas ESD chose the EMC Avamar backup and recovery solution. The Avamar solution enables the schools to automatically identify and remove redundant data from the backup process before sending it over the network to Avamar Data Stores located at Clackamas ESD’s datacenter. Clackamas ESD estimates incremental backups now take less than an hour and frequent full backups are no longer required.

"EMC Avamar is a complete solution that had all the pieces we needed," said Scheel. "The school districts are on tight budgets so they can only afford networks with limited bandwidth. With built-in data de-duplication technology, the school now uses less network bandwidth, has sped up the backup process and has reduced the amount of storage needed in the datacenter."

In addition to the remote backup service, Clackamas ESD uses EMC CLARiiON systems to store data for its Oracle-based electronic student information system (eSIS), which enables teachers and administrators to use a Web portal for communicating with students and parents and facilitating internal functions such as attendance, class scheduling, grading and student information. The CLARiiON information infrastructure also stores data for a Microsoft Windows file server and financial document imaging application.

"I’ve been very impressed with the thoroughness of EMC Global Services," said Scheel. "They asked the right questions, captured extensive information about our requirements and then applied it throughout the process. The result was that we got a very high-quality implementation that was on time and on budget. And because EMC worked side-by-side with our staff, we essentially received some advanced training in storage area networks and backup and recovery technologies."

Scheel added: "The EMC products are very solid. Once they’re in and configured, we don’t have to play with them. They just work. With clients on tight budgets, any opportunity to save staff time on tweaking or repairing systems translates into a cost savings for the organizations we serve. When it comes to EMC, there’s a high confidence level all around."