Schoharie Central Schools Selecting Unitrends

Unitrends announced that Schoharie Central Schools (SCS) has replaced their costly and unreliable DLT tape-based backup solution with a Unitrends D2D appliance which supports its Novell NetWare, Novell GroupWise, Novell eDirectory, and Microsoft Windows environment.

Schoharie is an agricultural and residential rural community located in Upstate New York. Schoharie Central Schools (SCS) consists of two connected buildings on a single campus with approximately 1200 students in grades K-12. SCS is one of twenty-three school districts administered by the Capital Region Board of Cooperative Education (BOCES).

In the Spring of 2009, SCS had outgrown the existing DLT tape backup solution and was facing expansion of its existing storage and server environment. The school district needed to automate its file backups and assure whole system protection for four NetWare servers and two Windows servers.

“I just could not see spending the money on the number of tapes we would have needed to do the job, so I started looking at disk to disk solutions,” said David Holmes, network and systems technician, SCS.

SCS investigated multiple options but was discouraged by the high pricing for some and the lack of protection for their Novell NetWare platform from others. Maintaining Novell security attributes was an important selection criterion for SCS’ data protection solution so when Holmes found Unitrends he was pleased to learn that it would backup NetWare including trustee assignments, access control lists and other advanced options. Unitrends’ BareMetal backup and recovery features was also a significant advantage for SCS, as was Unitrends’ advanced protection for Novell eDiscovery and GroupWise.

SCS installed a Unitrends Recovery-610 appliance with an eSATA docking station and rotational external SATA drives for nearly 1TB of data. The solution provides automated, complete data protection with rapid recovery from the onsite appliance as well as remote management. The archive feature also enables SCS to safely transfer copies of protected system and file backups to an offsite location for recovery from site-level disaster. Now SCS benefits from automated backups, remote monitoring and fast, easy restoration.

“A couple of weeks ago, the superintendent had a problem with his email archive,” said Homes. “After having had the experience of digging through tapes to find the archive directory, Unitrends was phenomenal. I was able to browse full backups month by month for four months, and in ten minutes I found the deleted archive, then in less than that the directory was fully recovered. With tape this would have taken many hours; as opposed to a few minutes with Unitrends.”

“At Unitrends we’re different,” said Mark Campbell, Chief Operating Officer, Unitrends. “Other backup companies say they support Novell environments but don’t handle the advanced features for which Novell is so well known and so appreciated. We’re committed to supporting the backup of Novell operating systems and applications as well as Windows, Mac OS X, and other platforms that constitute the heterogeneous environment that is so prevalent in the education sector. And we do it without charging a ‘backup tax’ for each operating system, application, or computer that we protect.”

To read more on the Schoharie Central Schools story