Unified Port of San Diego Opting for SEP Software sesam

SEP Software Corp., in backup and DR solutions, announced the Unified Port of San Diego has been relying on SEP to backup their mission-critical data at the speed and performance necessary to support their large-scale heterogeneous IT environment for over three years.

The Unified Port District of San Diego is a special district created by the California State Legislature in 1962 and manages the San Diego Bay and surrounding waterfront properties.

The Port sought a new backup solution that could support their critical data. Current backups were taking over three days to complete and more often than not, would not complete at all. The port constantly encountered errors during their daily backups and often had problems restoring data. Employees spent nights and weekends babysitting their backup solution and dreaded the next error message, initiating a search for a new solution.

“One of the challenges to finding a solution is that we run NetWare as our native OS and we are migrating to OES on SUSE Linux by the end of this year,” said Port IT manager Adolfo Segura. “We needed to find a backup solution that would allow for the maintenance of the existing environment, help us create an easy transition to Linux and backup our GroupWise email system – which we are operationally required to be able to backup and restore in a timely manner – all at the same time.“

SEP delivers a single backup solution to protect company infrastructures enterprise-wide. Their backup and DR solution, SEP sesam, ensures that data security for both virtual and physical environments can be achieved.

Port network system analyst Jasmin Mededovic stated: “It was clear from the beginning of the proof of concept that [SEP sesam] would be easy to install and maintain. [SEP sesam] installed simply and easily and we were able to perform test backups in no time. We could even assess the advantages of using their Multi-Streaming Technology to simultaneously stream many jobs to our backup devices. The fact that SEP sesam works natively with Linux, as we will be moving to SUSE Linux very soon, will be a big plus for our environment.“

“With SEP sesam, our backup time went from a best case scenario of three and a half days to having 99% of a full backup done in two to three hours,” Mededovic recalled. “We have one server on a slow data link and this extended the full backup to about five or six hours total. However, that slow server will be eliminated during our migration to a faster environment over the next year, and this will mean we will be able to perform a full system backup in a two to three hour time-frame.“

With the configurations in place for the Port, they have seen a 97% decrease in full backup time.

“SEP made the installation and migration of data extremely easy. The support staff I work with is outstanding,” stated Segura. “Our primary contact is one of the best I have ever worked with. Support has always been readily available, responsive, professional and very knowledgeable. I wish other companies had people like this as well because they are just great to work with.“

SEP will be an integral part of the Port’s transition to SUSE Linux and further VMware integration. The current environment is approximately 80% physical and 20% virtual but they plan on migrating more and more to VMware.

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