SEP Software Provides Long-term Reliable Solution for City of Thousand Oaks

Since 2011, the City of Thousand Oaks, CA, has been using SEP Software as their backup solution and have received benefits with the fast, efficient and easy-to-use solution.

Dustin Hurshman, IT analyst for the City, said: “The performance of SEP sesam has gone above and beyond what we expected of the product. The time it takes to complete a full backup has decreased by 235%. SEP has enabled us to re-architect our backup strategy to include more data in less time.“

In 2011, the City was facing a growing challenge. “As our data grew in size, our full backups to tape of our main data center were beginning to take more than 36 hours to complete. This restricted us to performing full backups during weekend hours only. In addition, our daily incremental backups were running around 14 hours, starting at 6:00 PM and kept running past 7:30 AM, which meant they were still running when we opened for business each morning. The overhead in time and number of tapes it was taking to backup our data caused us to seek a new solution. Our old solution with Symantec wasn’t meeting our needs and had become time consuming. The city had to be selective about what data to backup and how. The challenge of finding a backup solution that worked well with all of our OSs was becoming more difficult,” explained Hurshman.

“With SEP sesam, we are able to complete our full backups each night in only 8.5 hours. The software is much faster and we are able to include more data on a regular basis. The performance of SEP sesam has gone above and beyond what we expected of the product. Not only has our workload been eased, we now have a quality backup solution that has expanded the amount of data we are backing up to include system files we had to leave out with the previous solution. The time it takes to complete a full backup has decreased by 235%,” Hurshman attested. “We are continuing to backup even more thanks to how quickly the backups run. Because of SEP sesam’s performance and functionality, we are now expanding our implementation and adding additional backup jobs from other remote locations. We rotate our tapes daily and have been able to not only reduce the number of tapes we are using, but also the number of cases we have to send to the offsite storage facility.“