Falmouth Exeter Plus cuts data backup time by two-thirds with Arcserve Unified Data Protection
'We had to find something new - and what we've got from Arcserve is so much more than faster recovery,' said Nathan Prisk, FX Plus Head of technology and innovation
Falmouth Exeter Plus (FX Plus), the service delivery partner of Falmouth University and the University of Exeter, has cut data backup and protection times by two-thirds following a successful deployment of Arcserve's Unified Data Protection (UDP) software.
FX Plus delivers shared higher education services and facilities for the universities of Exeter and Falmouth, which share a campus near Penryn, just outside Falmouth in Cornwall. The campus is used by 5,500 students and 1,200 faculty and support staff, with IT systems shared by users from both universities.
Prior to the deployment of the new technology, FX Plus was backing up to tape, causing the process of backup and recovery to be slow. The process would regularly take the IT team all weekend to complete and often ran into Monday morning, impacting the performance of email and file servers and disrupting services for Exeter and Falmouth students.
FX Plus therefore opted to deploy Arcserve UDP to accelerate backup speeds and simplify recovery management. Falmouth and Exeter now store data on virtualised servers, with dashboards allowing the IT team to view every department's backup needs.
Now, every weekend, Arcserve UDP automatically backs up the entire IT estate, while incremental backups are run Monday to Friday. Once completed, backups are automatically replicated to a storage area network in a separate building.
Arcserve's Unified Data Protection software also gives Falmouth and Exeter students and staff access to a self-service function, which they can use to recover their own files.
"We had to find something new - and what we've got from Arcserve is so much more than faster recovery," said Nathan Prisk, FX Plus head of technology and innovation.
"Our backup processes are tailored to the demands of our systems. We can see where the data is coming from. And we're confident that Arcserve will meet our backup and recovery management needs long into the future," he added.
The system now protects FX Plus's SQL Server and Oracle databases, 5,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and Active Directory accounts, operational systems including HR, finance and accounting systems, and the student database, and provides 5TB of file storage.
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