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March 29, 2012

School IT: Online Backup and Disaster Recovery at St. Francis High

Nick is Zetta's Corporate Reporter, and has been writing and telling stories about technology with blogs and social media since the days when the BBS reigned.

Larry Steinke of St. Francis High School needed a simple, low-maintenance data backup solution, so he could focus on other pressing IT needs at the school. With over 1700 students and 100 faculty members at the school, Steinke has a lot of data to manage. On a daily basis, the IT team at St. Francis deals with email, directory, and web services as well as cross-platform support and databases full of teacher and student files.
School IT backup
Previously, files were stored on tape in the vault at a fireproof facility at the school, but according to Steinke, “I had to always check to see if it was having issues like disks filling up or backups failing. Sometime it was difficult to find the necessary files to recover making disaster recovery a real challenge.”

Once the data from St. Francis was at Zetta’s datacenters, it became available in a directly mountable file system for instant access or recovery, including historic versions of the files created through automated snapshots. Files can now be accessed in-place on the Zetta file service, transferred back to a local storage device, or both.

School Data Recovery
“I wasn’t actually looking for an offsite solution,” explained Steinke, “because all the ones we had looked at were too expensive.” But after finding out how affordable the Zetta solution could be for the school, Steinke brought Zetta on board in November 2010 and began installing ZettaMirror on its Windows servers, later implementing on the school’s Linux servers as well.

“I don’t worry about the backups getting done any more, I get email alerts if something might be wrong, and Zetta tech support is there to help. It’s pretty much a hands-off operation.”

With automatic, encrypted nightly online backups of altered files, St. Francis enjoys swift and secure data transfers. As new servers are added to St. Francis’s IT arsenal in the future, Steinke plans to turn to ZettaMirror to grow with the school.

Tags: Enterprise Cloud Storage, online backup, school online backup, Snapshots, Zetta Data Protect, ZettaMirror
Posted in Customer Success Stories, Disaster Recovery, Offsite Backup, Online Backup | No Comments »

December 20, 2011

ZipRealty finds a home for its online backup data with Zetta

Jeff runs corporate marketing for Zetta. Prior to Zetta, Jeff was VP of Marketing at Pivot3 and VP of Marketing at Pillar Data Systems.

IT Director Richard Tso needed an online backup and archive solution to relieve the congestion his primary SAN. ZipRealty, Inc. was founded in 1999 to simplify the complex and stressful tasks of buying and selling a home. Their innovative online solution guides clients step-by-step through the home buying and selling processes with licensed ZipRealty agents to chauffeur them along the way, helping customers to save thousands of dollars and quickly and more efficiently reach their real estate goals.

The Challenge:

As an online, data-driven business, ZipRealty and IT Director Richard Tso required extensive file storage, including space for online backup data and terabytes of legacy archive data that, while not needed on a regular basis, had to be accessible online. Leaving these files on the expensive primary SAN storage was not the answer.

“We were looking for a more economical way to store the archived data,” explained Tso. “We even looked into building a box ourselves with low-cost SATA drives, but then we found a better answer with Zetta.”

The Zetta Solution:

Initial testing began in the Fall of 2010 with about two terabytes of small image files. Some performance issues surfaced, as files weren’t moving quickly enough, so changes were made to both the Zetta system as well as how the client on the ZipRealty servers was configured. “Zetta engineering and support worked with us and improved performance of small files,” said Tso. “Now it’s reliable and quick.”

Today, Zetta Data Protect with ZettaMirror is running on a number of ZipRealty’s Linux servers, moving archived data to the Zetta storage service in Santa Clara, California. Files to be archived are placed into specific directories on the local servers. ZettaMirror moves the files to Zetta, two or three times per month, as necessary. ZipRealty is using a scriptable command line interface rather than the GUI interface, as that better fits their operations. Data is both transferred to Zetta in encrypted format and stored in encrypted format at Zetta for complete security. The Zetta storage service provides enterprise-class and better data protection with redundancy throughout.

Recently, ZipRealty began relying on ZettaMirror to synchronize and back up critical end user files on its Linux servers. These directories are scanned and changed files or blocks moved to Zetta multiple times per week.

ZipRealty is currently backing up and archiving over five terabytes of data to the Zetta Storage Service. For additional data protection, the ZipRealty Santa Clara Zetta volume is set to automatically replicate to the Zetta Secaucus, New Jersey data center, maintaining a redundant copy of the archived data across the continent.

The Results:
With Zetta, ZipRealty now has a smoothly running, cost-effective data archive system and process. Terabytes of information have been moved to the Zetta storage service, freeing up expensive primary SAN space for other uses. Although ZipRealty has not had to pull back data from Zetta for an emergency recovery, they did test out the recovery process and recovery times, and everything worked well.

Future plans call for expanding the use of ZettaMirror for additional file backups.

“We’re very happy with Zetta,” concluded Tso. “ZettaMirror is rock solid. We don’t even worry about it.”

For more information, visit the Zetta Online Backup & Instant Recovery information center.

Tags: Archive, online backup, replication
Posted in Customer Success Stories, Data Backup | No Comments »

November 30, 2011

Acupay: 2 Continents of Data, 1 Easy Backup & Recovery Solution

Gary is VP Marketing for Zetta. He has 15 years of experience in storage, cloud services and security. Prior to joining Zetta, Gary worked in HP and Symantec, where he was a co-founder of cloud storage business unit for healthcare. At Symantec, he worked closely with EMC and NetApp on storage security initiatives. Gary holds two patents in Internet Security.

acupay logo Acupay, with offices in New York, London, and Madrid, has invented revolutionary new systems to allow issuers, custodians, brokers, and investors to overcome the many hurdles to reducing excess foreign taxes on cross-border securities holdings. Additionally, Acupay utilizes a central, web-based system for end investors to secure their tax relief electronically, greatly reducing the time and effort required to obtain their paperwork. Managing all of this data is Thorpe Thompson, Acupay’s Director of Technology. His small staff manages information spread across two continents, making the task of ensuring adequate backups and disaster protection plans are in place a must.

The Challenge:

With so much financial information to manage, it was imperative that Acupay employ a reliable backup solution to handle their SQL databases and file data that needed to be protected.

Acupay’s previous backup solution involved two data center locations, one in New York and the other in London. The strategy included nightly incremental tape backups and weekly full system backups. The tapes, which were stored in an offsite tape facility, were expensive to store, and overseeing backups at the London office was difficult at best. Thompson’s constant challenge was to ensure that everything ran smoothly.

“We work with a small IT staff,” worried Thompson, “and if people were out sick or on vacation the backups weren’t always getting done in a timely manner. The weekly tape rotation could be missed.”

The Solution:

Zetta came to Acupay’s rescue in January 2011. Because ZettaMirror requires no ongoing maintenance, all Thompson had to do was select the correct directories and a desired backup schedule and let the system run itself. “It is set-it-and-forget-it,” claimed Thompson. “The installation was painless. My Zetta salesperson walked me through the first ZettaMirror install and then I did the rest myself. All of our offsite backup is with Zetta now.”

Acupay is currently running ZettaMirror in four to five Windows servers in the New York office and one Windows server in the London office. They are mirroring SQL databases and end user files, including documents and spreadsheets, to the Zetta datacenter in New Jersey. They are currently protecting nearly two terabytes of information, a number that will undoubtedly continue to grow as their business and databases expand.

The Results:

Thompson no longer worries about missed backups or wrong tapes. “We are really happy with it. For about the same money we were paying for tape media and our offsite tape service, we implemented Zetta and got better reliability, I spend less time and attention on backup, it takes less time for data restores, and we added the London office to the process.”

“We have had to do a couple of restores. Before, I would have had to travel to the offsite storage facility to fetch the correct tape, bring it back to the office and then go through a tape restore. With Zetta, I had the file back in less than fifteen minutes and I never left my desk.”

For more information, visit the Zetta backup & recovery resource center.

Tags: data backup, disaster recovery
Posted in Customer Success Stories, Data Backup, Data Protection, Disaster Recovery | No Comments »

November 21, 2011

St. Francis High School Eases Data Backup Pain

Meet Larry Steinke, Systems Manager of St. Francis High School in Mountain View, CA.

Larry needed a simple, low-maintenance data backup solution, so he could focus on other pressing IT needs at the school. With over 1600 students and 100 faculty members at the school, Steinke has a lot of data to manage. On a daily basis, the IT team at St. Francis deals with email, directory, and web services as well as cross-platform support and databases full of teacher and student files.

Previously, files were stored on tape in the vault at a fireproof facility at the school, but according to Steinke, “I had to always check to see if it was having issues like disks filling up or backups failing. Sometime it was difficult to find the necessary files to recover making disaster recovery a real challenge.”

Zetta offered an online backup service that automatically maintains an offsite, online copy of production data and end user files. The installation was a snap, and the daily backup operation, including getting data offsite, runs by itself, freeing Steinke and the IT department to address other IT issues.

Once the data from St. Francis was at Zetta’s datacenters, it became available in a directly mountable file system for instant access or recovery, including historic versions of the files created through automated snapshots. Files can now be accessed in-place on the Zetta file service or can be transferred back down to a local storage device, or both.

“I wasn’t actually looking for an offsite solution,” explained Steinke, “because all the ones we had looked at were too expensive.” But after finding out how affordable the Zetta solution could be for the school, Steinke brought Zetta on board in November 2010 and began installing ZettaMirror on its Windows servers, later implementing on the school’s Linux servers as well. According to Steinke, “Installation was very easy.”

“I don’t worry about the backups getting done any more,” said Steinke. “I get email alerts if something might be wrong, and Zetta tech support is there to help. It’s pretty much a hands-off operation.” With automatic, encrypted nightly data backups of altered files, St. Francis enjoys swift and secure data transfers. Steinke plans to turn again to ZettaMirror as new servers are added to St. Francis’s IT arsenal in the future.

Watch a video on how easy it is to set up offsite data protection and instant data recovery.

Tags: case study, data backup
Posted in Customer Success Stories, Data Backup | No Comments »

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