Backup And Recovery: Revinetix Backup And Recovery Appliances Make Protecting City Government Data Simple And Affordable
Revinetix, Disk2Disk2DiskT backup solutions, recently announced that the City of Overland Park has installed two Revinetix Sentio backup and recovery appliances to protect Exchange, SQL, Oracle, and other network servers. The second largest city in Kansas, Overland Park operates more than 120 computer servers to sustain police, fire, public works and other city operations. The City also operates critical public safety dispatch servers for Johnson County, as well as the emergency operations center servers for the Mid-America Regional Council, the regional planning organization for Greater Kansas City.
Overland Park's largely Windows-based computer servers support between 1,000 and 1,300 users at any given time and host more than 15 Terabytes of data. To protect these mission-critical information systems, the City historically used Compaq SDLT Tape Libraries and Veritas Backup Exec software.
Backup Challenges
Over time, Overland Park's tape backup tools became outdated, cumbersome and lacked the performance and storage capacity needed. Reliability, as well as administrative overhead were also notable concerns.
"Backups were running 24 hours a day - there was no such thing as a backup window," said Overland Park Network Administrator Randy Oehrle. "I couldn't back everything up in a reasonable time. It was a challenge to say the least. There were so many things that could go wrong, and I was spending literally 90% of my time rotating and recataloging tapes, searching through backups.
Paradigm Shift from Tape
As part of the public Request for Proposal (RFP) process, Overland Park reviewed proposals from EMC, CommVault, Veritas, and their associated Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs). Revinetix' Value-Added Reseller (VAR) Yellow Dog Networks presented a disk-based alternative, the Revinetix Sentio 4000 appliance.
"I wrote the RFP with VTLs in mind, but I left it open-ended with caveats for specifications, in case this may not be the best or optimal solution," Oehrle said. "Everyone had the same dog and pony show, except for Revinetix. Revinetix and Yellow Dog Networks proposed to eliminate tape all together. I had nothing but problems with tape, so this was great. In the end, the two things that cast votes for Revinetix were the simplicity of the solution and the price. The simplicity was tremendous, browser-based, and it was significantly less expensive."
Backup Made Affordable
Besides ease of installation and use, affordability played a significant role in Overland Park's bidding process.
"For CommVault, NetWorker and Veritas, support is outrageous," Oehrle said. "For my environment support costs would have cost roughly $30,000 a year, not counting if I added anything. For three years, you're talking almost $100,000 just for support, forget the hardware. They are very capable, very complex products, but my gosh, Veritas is not intuitive, nor easily deployed. Simplicity is the kicker."
"The software licensing for Revinetix is great. If I have a million servers, I have all of the agents. With Veritas or CommVault, I have to add a server and add another agent and that costs so much money. That is really a hassle, whereas now I am licensed to do that and I am done."
The Solution
Overland Park currently has two Revinetix Sentio 4000 appliances installed. This provides the City with 30 Terabyes of storage capacity per device and significant performance gains.
"The difference going from tape to disk is readily apparent. Whereas most of the tape backups were just running all of the time, now we start backups at 8PM each night, and they run just 5-6 hours. I now have one appliance, and I don't have to reload software. I just have to browse to it again. A couple of clicks and I can start restoring."
"I have fiber, and the Revinetix box now replicates between appliances every day. If I lose this building, a couple of clicks and the replicated appliance is now the primary appliance and all of the clients are taken care of. I can get data backup very quickly. That has changed the perspective on DR a bit. Now the data is already offsite."
"It was becoming 90 percent of my day to deal with backups. It has now gone from hours to seconds in the day. For me, it is incredible. I can actually do my job, network management, instead of backup management."
Backing up Government
Revinetix understands the data protection needs of government organizations. State and local government is now empowered to replace traditional tape backup devices with high speed, hot swappable hard disks that can be easily removed and stored off-site for disaster recovery measures. Revinetix appliances are known for reliability and ease of use. Unlike most enterprise backup solutions, Revinetix offers a site license rather then a per-client license fee, allowing every user on the network access to the backup appliance for the same cost. Revinetix standard products currently support storage capacities ranging from 400 Gigabytes up to 18 Terabytes of raw storage capacity.
Advanced Management Software
Each Revinetix appliance comes with the revolutionary operating system RevOST to manage and automate backup and recovery functions through a simple to use Web-based administration interface. Supporting all major operating systems in use today, this powerful software keeps a running catalog database of all the files that have been saved on the appliance, so when the time comes to retrieve vital information, you simply point and click to find the file or directory you need.
About Revinetix, Inc.
Revinetix provides innovative data protection solutions that ensure continuity of business, control of critical information and confidence in recovery systems. Revinetix offers the first total disk backup and recovery solution that allows automated backup schedules for every user on the network and allows critical data to be stored safely off-site from a single appliance. For more information, customers are encouraged to contact Revinetix at 801-263-5116 or sales@revinetix.com to locate a reseller in their local area.
SOURCE: Revinetix, Inc.