You are in:
- EDITORIAL CONTENT » Case Studies
rapid data management at Dorset County Council
Garry Phipps, ICT Analyst, Dorset County Council, explains how the council has improved its data management capabilities and processes with EVault…
Local government in Dorset is divided into six district or borough councils, two unitary authorities (responsible for local government in the towns of Poole and Bournemouth) and the Dorset County Council (CC).
The Dorset CC provides education, social care and health services, highways management, trading standards, and local services such as libraries for all of Dorset. These require a significant level of administration, and Dorset CC also provides IT support to many of the satellite sites that are at the frontline of service delivery.
Ready for faster recovery
“Data volumes were increasing of course, but our two main problems were the time it was taking to back up to tape and the fact that many of our remote sites had their own tape backup systems but were often recording over the same tape every day—making recovery of information older than 24 hours impossible,” commented Gary Phipps, ICT Analyst at Dorset County Council.
At the time, Dorset was relying on tape storage, and backup windows were becoming so large that they impinged on normal business activity. Remote sites relied on IT support and admin from Dorset County Council’s IT team based in Dorchester to some extent, but many had their own tape systems. Unfortunately, without onsite IT support these tapes were not managed and changed regularly.
“We wanted to move to a centrally managed disk-to-disk backup solution, both to improve our data management capabilities and processes, and also for long term cost reasons. Disk backup is faster and more cost-effective than tape storage for what we required,” explained Phipps.
Discovering the value of EVault
Dorset’s team considered several options and as part of the process invited EVault partner TriSys a leading value-added reseller specialising in storage management, in to meet them.
“The EVault technology was the deciding factor, and the online capability offered a very cost-effective way of tackling the issuing of backing up data from our remote sites,” said Phipps. “Added to this, TriSys has local offices and a strong track record in data management solutions, and after considering many options we felt the EVault system was the best solution for us.”
Dorset, supported by TriSys and EVault, installed a vault (server) for storage of the data and the EVault InfoStage® online backup software at the Dorchester central offices.
Phipps continued, “Originally we planned on putting 30 to 35 of our servers onto the system to backup to the vault, it proved really successful, and now we have 67 servers on the system. Everything including mail servers, Oracle servers, Notes and Excel files are being backed up using the solution.”
Rapid recovery
With this increase in servers being backed up to disk using Evault InfoStage, a second vault has been installed at one of the County Council’s sites in the North of the county. Already between seven and seven-and-a-half terabytes are stored on the larger vault.
Phipps concluded, “We are really pleased with the EVault solution, it has worked extremely well for us. Dorset County Council remote sites can be backed up quickly and its data is protected as we can now recover older data and we can do so very quickly. The overall cost-effectiveness of moving to a disk-based system and the increased level of automation offered by Evault InfoStage means that backup and recovery have been transformed into pretty straightforward activities, leaving us free to focus on delivering better services in other areas.”
