Press Release - July 17, 2008 - Data Storage Connection

National Renal Alliance Finds Solution To Backup Corporate Data Center

Jeff Cobb, Director of Network Operations at National Renal, is responsible for overseeing the data center and managing their disaster recovery and backup procedures. The data center has 6 primary servers. 5 of the servers run on a Windows platform and consist of Exchange, SQL and file servers and one UNIX server that houses their medical records database.

Jeff was tasked with backing up data at the corporate data center and the data at the remote sites over the company's virtual private network. The amount of data at the data center was increasing quickly as their business grew and added more clinics. National Renal was using a Dell tape autoloader and Veritas Backup Exec to manage their daily backups. The tape solution was no longer able to handle their increasing amount of data and backups were approaching the physical capacity of this system and the tape media. In addition, their backup window was approaching the next business day which was becoming a major issue. As they continued their expansion around the country, National Renal needed a solution that could handle growing data as well as be able to shrink their backup window to accommodate users in multiple time zones and clinics that needed to access data at all hours.

National Renal decided to tackle their data challenge in two phases and used Idealstor hardware and software for both phases. For phase I of this project National Renal implemented an Idealstor 8 Bay Backup Appliance and Ibac Data Protection Software to backup their growing data at their data center. They currently use a 2 week rotation of 10 300GB ejectable disks that are used to run their daily backups and are taken offsite and stored at a bank vault to be used again in two weeks.

Ibac was chosen over Veritas Backup Exec due to its ease of use and implementation and the fact that it was problem free compared to Veritas software. "I work in a fast paced and complicated environment and the last thing I need is a complicated backup package that needs to be managed on an ongoing basis," says Jeff Cobb. "I have used Veritas here at National Renal and at a prior job and most of my time was spent troubleshooting backup issues such as corrupt files, catalog errors and failed backups." In addition, once a disk has an initial full backup or baseline copy, the next time a backup is run, Ibac will simply backup the changed files and merge that data into the last full backup. This gives National Renal a full backup in the time it takes to run an incremental backup.


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