Highland Community College Chooses SEP Software

Highland Community College needed one backup and DR solution to tie everything together: one vendor, one point of contact, one main backup server and one backup and DR plan.

The college wanted to leverage a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup strategy that would modernize their backups, eliminate redundancy and ideally have one vendor-supported application.

In the past, the college had multiple backup solutions in place to meet their needs and ended up with multiple backup infrastructures. Ultimately, they were using Arcserve to backup file and print servers, vRanger to backup their virtual environment and an assortment of different scripts to cover databases and applications. This required multiple backup servers, multiple targets for disk storage and three tape systems.

Highland Community College selected SEP Software Corp. as their backup and DR solution because it would support their entire current environment as well as any foreseeable changes in the future.

Nathan Hensal, director of IT services, explained: “Our goal was to modernize and consolidate our IT infrastructure and we felt that SEP was the only product we tested that offered the level of reliability and flexibility for the future that we had envisioned.“

“Switching to SEP allowed us to consolidate from three backup platforms down to one. After calculating the time our old backup software took and factoring in our data growth, we can confidently say SEP completes our full backups over 25 times faster than our old solution,” Hensal said. “I think SEP is a very capable, well-engineered product. Everything is well thought out, straight- forward to use and is modular in its design once you determine the who, what, when, and where.“

“I am very satisfied,” said Hensal, whose favorite feature of SEP is the ability to monitor real-time job status. “It’s really nice to leave SEP running in the background. I can check it and see a large amount of backup detail all on one screen. It’s a single pane of glass for looking at all backup status information for both real-time and historical purposes. I would recommend SEP to other colleges, universities or anyone for that matter.“

This past year, the college experienced a disaster that eliminated one of their SANs. Hensal reported to SEP that having SEP running made him feel at ease when he may otherwise have been in a panic, because he knew that regardless of what happened to the SAN, he would be able to get all of his data back using SEP. Ultimately, the college’s SAN vendor came through for them and was able to get everything back from the destroyed SAN. But Hensal said it was outstanding to have that level of confidence in a product like SEP at such a stressful time.