Charity the Royal British Legion has installed a storage system to protect critical data and recover faster from disasters.

The charity has installed a storage area network (SAN) from EqualLogic at an offsite location.

'We wanted to improve our disaster recovery processes to achieve a much quicker set-up and recovery time compared to the tape-based system we had in place,' said Richard Lovelock, head of IT.

Retrieving information from tapes can take as long as a day, whereas retrieving information from a SAN can be done in minutes.

When data no longer becomes critical, the Royal British Legion backs it up from the SAN to tapes.

The solution also means that the Royal British legion does not necessarily have to invoke complete disaster recovery, as information can be selectively retrieved.

Lovelock also expects the system to provide the charity with cost savings.

'Because we are consolidating servers and storage we think we are going to save quite a bit of power,' he said. 'We think we can probably save 20-30 per cent of power on individual servers. That might save us between £5,000 and £7,000 a year.'