Teach For America Deploys EMC Backup and Recovery

EMC Corporation announced that Teach For America, Inc., a
non-profit organization that works in partnership with communities to expand
educational opportunity for children facing the challenges of poverty, deployed
an integrated EMC backup and recovery solution to protect its expanding and
evolving IT environment.

By leveraging EMC Avamar, EMC Data Domain and EMC NetWorker solutions, Teach
For America has accelerated its backup and recovery processes, extended data
retention times, consolidated its remote office data, reduced its dependence on
tape and established a DR capability. In addition, with Avamar protecting
its VMware environment, the company has established an exceptional foundation
for the continuation of its virtualization efforts. Teach For America is also
moving forward with a complete storage technology refresh, upgrading its
existing systems to VNX unified storage.

Teach For America is a data driven organization that uses metrics to
measure and improve its criteria for the recruitment and development of
successful teachers. At any given time, its 1,900 full time staffers are
supporting over 10,000 teachers impacting nearly 750,000 students across the
United States. With its automated EMC backup and recovery solution, Teach For
America’s IT staff can focus on helping to drive the organization’s rapid
expansion and accelerate its mission to bring quality education to students in
urban and rural public schools.

Customer Benefits:

• Backups and Recoveries: With
  EMC backup and recovery products, full backups on weekends no longer extend
  into the following business week, and file recoveries take only a few minutes,
  versus the business day their previous system required.
• Retention for Better Recovery
  Operations: EMC deduplication technologies have enabled Teach For America
  to extend its online data retention period to enable efficient servicing of
  recovery requests.
• Consolidated Remote Office Data:
  With Avamar, it has been able to arrest growing costs
  associated with their remote office backups, and consolidate remote office
  backup data to their data center.
• Operational Efficiency: With its
  automated EMC backup and recovery solution, it has saved
  significant staff time and can focus on more strategic projects.
• DR: Teach For America’s
  Avamar and Data Domain systems automatically replicate backups to a secondary
  data center, ensuring safety and recoverability in
  the event of disaster.

Customer Challenges and
Solution:
The Teach For America IT organization supports more
than 1,900 users across 46 offices – up from 850 users and 26 sites five years
ago. Accompanying its organizational expansion, annual data
growth rate was over 50%, and its previous tape-based backup infrastructure was
increasingly not able to keep pace. Full backups intended to complete on
weekends were now requiring three days, often running into business hours on
Monday. In addition, protecting data from its remote offices had become more
challenging, as data at each remote office grew in size and the number of
remote offices increased. Teach for America needed a new, more scalable and
cost-efficient backup solution for both its data center and remote offices.

To address the organization’s rapid growth, Teach For America
partnered with EMC to create an integrated backup and recovery solution that
leveraged a range of EMC products, ensuring that backup windows and RTOs were
met, automation would reduce staff time expended for backup and DR, and that
the solution could scale to meet future demands of the organization.

NetWorker unified backup and recovery software and Data Domain
deduplication storage systems were integrated via DD Boost software to ensure
rapid backup and recovery performance for databases and applications while
reducing storage capacity requirements and network bandwidth usage.

Avamar was deployed for both consolidation of remote office
backups and to protect Teach For America’s VMware environment.

Automated replication of both Data Domain and Avamar-based backups
to remote systems at a secondary site ensured a DR capability.

Thomas Licciardello, VP, technology operations, Teach For America,
said: "We chose an integrated hybrid
solution from EMC to leverage the various technologies that could keep pace
with our growth. EMC has a broad, well integrated portfolio of backup and
recovery solutions that we’re confident will enable our organization to expand
so we can reach more children for years to come.

"Restoring from Data Domain takes a
few minutes instead of a full business day with tape. The efficiency and
integrity of Data Domain has been like night and day compared to our old
system.

"By using Avamar to
backup our regional offices, we backup and consolidate remote data rapidly and
cost efficiently. We expect payback on the solution in just six to eight
months."