Alvarado ISD and Zinpro

Mid-sized enterprises are deploying virtualization and affordable data replication strategies to help ensure disaster recovery and business continuity, Compellent Technologies, Inc. announced. Two such organizations, Alvarado Independent School District (ISD) and Zinpro Corporation, use the Compellent Storage Center SAN’s storage virtualization applications to protect their critical information from unexpected data or natural disasters.

"The Atlantic hurricane season, tragic earthquakes and other natural disasters are constant reminders of the importance of having a reliable disaster recovery plan; but in 2009, IT departments are also facing depleted budgets and resources," said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, Compellent. "Compellent gives organizations of all sizes an easy-to-implement disaster recovery solution that doesn’t require extra manpower or an exorbitant price tag to protect their data from the unexpected – whether that’s an earthquake or a server outage."

Cost-Effective Data Protection
Alvarado ISD, a Texas K-12 school district with data spread across six locations and 96 square miles, established a regional disaster recovery (DR) consortium to provide an advanced and affordable DR strategy based on the Compellent SAN. A school district in the consortium uses its primary Compellent SAN for everyday operations, and replicates the data to a SAN that’s owned by another district, allowing IT administrators to avoid having to invest in additional infrastructure for DR purposes. As a technologically-advanced district that offers unique services like school-hosted electronic student portfolios, Alvarado sees replication as not only a business continuity strategy, but also the core of critical data protection.

"School districts like ours have the same disaster recovery needs as any business, but unlike most private organizations, our budget is strictly limited, and so we’re always seeking the most economical solutions and technologies to protect our students’ work," said Kyle Berger, executive director of technology services, Alvarado ISD. "Compellent’s efficient technology and our unique consortium approach helped us and the consortium members meet our growing disaster recovery needs without the high price tag of a traditional data replication solution. Now each district we service has the security of a primary and remote location, at a fraction of the cost, to ensure student and faculty’s work is protected in case of a disaster."

Faster Data Recovery
With offices and laboratories in the US and Europe, Zinpro Corporation, on the research and development of performance minerals for animals, uses Compellent’s snapshot and replication software to quickly back up its data to disk and replicate easily and affordably between the company’s headquarters and laboratory facilities.

"Zinpro is a company based on research, so being able to quickly and efficiently recover from an outage or failure is invaluable," said Bernie Wojcik, system administrator, Zinpro Corporation. "With Compellent’s replication and snapshot technologies, we’ve improved our disaster recovery time by 75 percent, enabling us to survive unexpected data losses and continue to support important research around the world. As a result of Compellent disaster recovery technologies, we’ve strengthened our business and improved our position for future growth."

The simplicity and robustness of Compellent’s disaster recovery solution makes it attractive for enterprises of all sizes. Using Compellent’s boot from SAN and continuous snapshot technology, administrators can create space-efficient copies to set up, recover and allocate any size volume to any server in seconds. Customers can also replicate an unlimited number of snapshots between sites and perform live tests of the replication, allowing multiple locations to serve as instant recovery points.