Sioux Falls School District Replaces Tape Backup With Evault

EVault, Inc., a Seagate Technology LLC company, announced that the South
Dakota Sioux Falls School District replaced its tape backup system with EVault
Plug-n-Protect backup and recovery appliances.

Using EVault has made restores faster and more predictable, and the school
district’s IT staff has regained 10 hours of time per week due to reduced
travel time between individual schools to change out tape cartridges or fix and
replace tape drives. EVault worked with partner High Plains Technology, Inc. to
implement the new system.

The Sioux Falls School District, the state’s largest K-12 district,
maintains a multi-platform network of about 100 servers backing up 12TB of data
across roughly 12,500 computers. Previously, the school district relied on a tape backup solution with tape libraries in every school building. The
tape backup implementation required expensive and time-consuming software
licenses, and the restores were difficult to administer.

"Those tape libraries
took a lot of hard work to manage," said David Carson, network manager
at Sioux Falls School District. "If
the staff member who usually changed the tapes got sick, we had to send someone
else to do it, and then that staff member couldn’t get his usual work done.
With EVault’s Plug-n-Protect solution, we now have an affordable all-in-one
disk-based appliance. With restores centralized, there’s no more need for our
staff to travel from school to school-freeing up valuable IT hours for more
strategic work."

EVault provided the Sioux Falls School District with a
backup and recovery solution delivered through the EVault Plug-n-Protect
appliance bundle. The school district now configures backups and manages
restores at its Central Services building using the Web-based EVault
CentralControl console, then replicates data to a secondary appliance at its
Instructional Planning Services building for additional data protection and
security.

"The Sioux Falls School
District is a perfect example of how small and medium institutions can benefit
from moving to a disk-based, all-in-one backup system," said Terry
Cunningham, president and general manager at EVault. "By breaking away from costly, ineffective tape backups and adopting an
adaptable and affordable solution like EVault Plug-n-Protect, institutions like
the Sioux Falls School District quickly see the time and savings value provided
by a comprehensive appliance that packages all backup components into a single
solution."