Two years ago Ian Wood, head of IT at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT), a registered international conservation charity, was running localised backups on individual servers at each of the organisation’s offices spread across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
The trust wanted to save money by consolidating email and file servers, and run more efficient backups that did not duplicate the same information at multiple sites, but found that its wide area network (Wan) capacity was not up to the job.
‘We wanted to provide a single network, bring all the servers back into our headquarters, hold all the data there and have everybody access it from the other offices,’ says Wood.
‘Because the speed of the Wan wasn’t appropriate, each centre became an island of data. There was a lot of data duplication, and we didn’t know if it was good duplication or not.’
By installing one of Riverbed’s Steelhead 1000 Wan optimisation devices at its central office, supplemented by eight Steelhead 500 appliances at the branch locations, all data backups are now performed remotely but transmitted to the central office for storage. This makes the backups much easier to control and verify, while restores are quicker to perform if data is lost at one of more branch offices.
Better Wan response times means users can also save their data over the network much more frequently, without fear of depriving other applications of the bandwidth they need.
‘Usually in Windows backup environments there is so much chat between the application and the server that it kills any thought of running things remotely,’ says Wood.
‘Data compression and file caching had its place, but we wanted people to be able to make changes and resave the data, and that could only be done with Riverbed’s latency reduction technology.’
As a charity, return on investment was very important to the WWT, and Wood estimates that Wan optimisation is saving the organisation about £15,000 to £20,000 per year.
‘All our software costs are very low though, and we don’t make the big savings that larger organisations could make on licensing costs by taking much bigger Microsoft Exchange and SQL servers out of each site,’ he says.
But synchronising remote backups in one location is only one aspect of the WWT’s disaster recovery strategy; Wood plans to take out a lease with a hosted service provider company at a later date, so that a complete backup of the central server can be replicated elsewhere.
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