Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority Selecting Arkeia

Arkeia Software, Inc. announced that the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority has selected its appliances to provide a data protection solution of both physical and virtual environments in order to reduce the cost and complexity of managing backup and disaster recovery operations.

SORTA is a public transportation agency serving Cincinnati and its suburbs, providing more than 17 million rides per year as part of its fixed-route bus and Access paratransit services. With a data center in downtown Cincinnati and three satellite data centers connected by 100Mbps links, SORTA was looking to replicate backup sets between data centers for safekeeping on disk while limiting tape to archiving in its main data center. SORTA wanted a single solution for data protection of both physical and virtual environments, complete with deduplication to limit LAN and WAN bandwidth.

To protect its four sites SORTA selected two Arkeia Network Backup appliances: the R220 backup appliance and R220-LTO backup appliance. Two sites are backed up over the WAN to an R220 Backup Appliance. All backups to each appliance are replicated to the other. While the replication delivers required off-site storage, the integrated LTO-4 drive in the second appliance allows tapes to be written for archiving purposes.

"The value of the Arkeia Backup Appliance has been incredible," said Michael Carey, systems administrator at SORTA. "We evaluated solutions from Avamar and Data Domain, as well as a solution based on Backup Exec. They were more complex and much more expensive. We made the right choice."

Carey said that the Arkeia solution has provided space savings of up to 97 percent with its Progressive Deduplication, allowing SORTA to reduce bandwidth needed to replicate backup sets over the WAN. Plug-and-play configuration made set up easy and day-to-day management is simple. He said that Arkeia’s support team is responsive and easy to work with whenever he has a question.

"When SORTA’s tape-centric legacy system couldn’t keep up with the organization’s virtualized, remote office infrastructure, SORTA went looking for a single solution that integrated hardware and software with one support contract for both elements," said Bill Evans, Arkeia CEO. "We were able to protect SORTA’s distributed infrastructure while helping them reduce costs and minimize support headaches.  With space savings, bandwidth reduction, and plug-and-play simplicity, we were able to satisfy SORTA’s exacting requirements better and more cost-effectively than competing solutions."