Open University Knowledge Media Institute Opts for BakBone

BakBone Software, Inc. announced that its NetVault: Backup solution has allowed the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at the Open University to design and deploy a reliable, low-maintenance and affordable backup strategy.

uses the software to protect 15 terabytes of data on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems. The data is comprised of databases, Web-related data, videos and other new media files across multiple applications, SQL Servers, MySQL, VMware snapshotting and backup.

The KMi was set up in 1995 to support the Open University (OU)’s bid to be at the forefront of research and development in several areas, including cognitive and learning sciences, artificial intelligence, semantic technologies and multimedia. The OU is the UK’s only university dedicated to distance learning, with approximately 150,000 undergraduate and over 30,000 postgraduate students.

The KMi IT department had initially deployed a data protection strategy to provide staff and students with continuous access to data, but after some time the legacy solution started to regularly fail to restore data. As a result, the team decided to review its backup process to design an environment that would provide reliable data protection without being an administrative burden on the team’s time. The heterogeneous nature of the existing infrastructure meant that the choice of available solutions was not broad; the team therefore turned to reseller NCE to guide them toward the most suitable product for their needs.

“We were looking to select and deploy a new backup solution quickly and smoothly because our restores could not be relied upon and that was a situation we were not prepared to accept; it was not good enough for KMi,” said Paul Alexander, IT & systems manager at KMi. “NetVault: Backup was reliable, easy to install, and takes half the time to manage compared to our previous solution. Thanks to BakBone, my team has reclaimed several hours of their working week.”

“As a trusted partner of the KMi for its storage and virtualisation solutions, we are conscious that any products we propose do not compromise our reputation,” said John Greenwood, solution sales director at NCE. “Our long-standing status as a BakBone Platinum Partner gave us comfort in recommending NetVault to provide the foundation of the KMi data backup strategy when we were first engaged on this project. By working closely with BakBone, we have provided a scalable solution that addresses the KMi current and future needs.”

At the KMi, NetVault: Backup ensures data protection even when the IT infrastructure is not attended, providing its users with 24/7 access to information. The KMi data protection infrastructure today also includes a storage area network (SAN) and a tape library. Data is mirrored between two locations within the same site, with a virtual tape library (VTL) in one and a physical tape library in the other. Data is backed up to the VTL and is then transferred to the physical tape library to protect the information in case of flood or fire, even before the tapes are taken offsite to a secure vault.

 “Thanks to BakBone, we have been able to deploy backup to disk for the first time, as it was finally affordable. The virtual tape library has made a great difference to our backup windows. The quality of the BakBone technical support team was also one of the decisive factors for us; this time we wanted to be confident that we were relying on a world-class data protection strategy,” continues Alexander. The KMi team evaluated backup solutions from four different vendors, but BakBone stood out among them.

The BakBone solution has already shown its reliability. When KMi suffered a security compromise to one of its primary web servers NetVault: Backup allowed the team to restore the entire server to a point in time prior to the time the compromise took place in less than one day.

“Data restores are like most insurance policies: nobody wants to have to resort to them but if the moment comes you want to be fully covered. BakBone NetVault: Backup has given the KMi the peace of mind that the institute’s data is not only protected but can be easily and quickly restored should the need arise,” said Chris Ross, vice president of EMEA at BakBone. “The KMi IT team is now looking at BakBone NetVault: FASTRecover to further enhance their data protection strategy. We are thrilled to be able to provide them with the tools to achieve this.”