Coach firm takes backup route

Antional express moves from tape to disk based backup

Coach operator National Express has installed a storage system across two data centres to back up information faster and more securely.

The company is using a disk-based system from backup and disaster recovery vendor Thinking Safe, replacing a process that first backed up to disks in servers and then streamed the data to tape.

‘We looked at traditional replacement options and the latest tape systems and realised we would still have a management overhead, so we started to look at disk-based backup,’ said David Jones, head of IT at National Express.

‘We have a remote lights-out data centre, and it was becoming very difficult to ensure that we had tape libraries in proper rotation; the volume of data against tape libraries was also becoming too big to manage,’ he said.

The new system allows National Express to back up all data more effectively and to restore it with minimal downtime.

‘This helps contain costs by reducing the time we spend on administration, and it allows us to invoke disaster recovery plans much more easily,’ said Jones.

The system also secures mobile data with encryption, has faster recovery of critical data and longer-term archiving than the previous solution.

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