Unitrends Recovers Salvation Army Data

Unitrends has fully recovered 100 percent of the Salvation Army’s IT infrastructure and nearly 500 GB of data in its Wisconsin and Upper Michigan data center. A water main break sent more than 2 million gallons of water into the organization’s basement-level data center, completely destroying the organization’s entire network infrastructure.

The organization’s disaster recovery solution – a Unitrends Data Protection Unit (DPU) – was found floating on top of the wreckage in more than six feet of water. Once the DPU unit was retrieved by a disk salvage company, and with IT provider DigiCorp at its side, the Salvation Army’s backup data was restored on replacement servers using the Unitrends DPU dissimilar BareMetal restore capabilities, automatically rebuilding the operating systems, applications and data from the ground up – regardless of the brand or model number of the replacement system.

“I can’t put a value on the Unitrends DPU. We got all the data back, which was a miracle, and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Without Unitrends and the tenacity of the disk salvage company, it would have been possible, but cost-prohibitive to try to recover the data,” said Rich Thorne, divisional IT manager, Salvation Army, Wisconsin and Upper Michigan Division.

The efficiency and ease of restoring the damaged servers and data with the Unitrends DPU disaster recovery solution made it possible for the Salvation Army to resume normal business operations soon after a major event completely wiped out its data center. Email and file data was available even before employees were able to get back to work, and critical financial data was recovered, ensuring that IT was not an inhibitor to business continuity. Most importantly, no data was lost.

“Every day small and medium-sized enterprises are faced with some type of data protection or disaster recovery challenge, and Unitrends is committed to delivering affordable, enterprise-class solutions that can successfully meet those challenges,” said Duncan McPherson, Unitrends president and CEO. “We’re pleased that our solution helped an organization that helps so many. The flood did enough to cause a disruption to business, but we’re happy that Unitrends’ products and people helped put the Salvation Army back in business quickly and easily.”