Alabama State Department of Education Selects AppAssure

AppAssure
Software, Inc. announced that Alabama State Department of Education
(ALSDE), a state agency with 33 departments and 133 school systems, replaced
Symantec Backup Exec with AppAssure’s Replay 4 backup and recovery solution for
its mission-critical Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL application servers
to relieve slow backups and high tape costs, while improving server restore
times from an entire day to two minutes.

"We were using Symantec’s Backup Exec and there
were two primary issues – the tapes were expensive and recovery was just too
slow," says Scott Crews, Network Manager at the Alabama State Department
of Education. "If you had to recover a file and you had the tape onsite,
it might take two hours – on a good day."

ALSDE’s Backup Administrator Lloyd
Nunnelee goes on to say: "That’s the best case scenario. That’s only if
the user knew when the file was last saved and we still had the information
onsite. But after two weeks when we had taken the tapes off-site, it was a shot
in the dark. At that point, it’d take almost the rest of the day."

As Crews and Nunnelee state, while they gratefully
never had a full server failure, they were spending more and more time dealing
with unworkable backup scenarios and failures. "About once a week, we came
in and found out that we didn’t get a good backup," says Crews,
"which is no small thing because we have apps like the child nutrition
program running on SQL, which is huge for federal dollars – schools go online and
order their meals, produce, and so forth."

According to Nunnelee, the final catalyst came for
them when they had to restore email with Backup Exec for one of the Assistant
Superintendents, and they couldn’t get the data back. "We all looked at
each other and said let’s move on," recalls Crews. "I said to my team
we’re all smart folks, let’s start researching a better backup and disaster
recovery product and see what’s out there."

Crews and his staff knew what kind of a solution they
needed, he says – a solution that was advanced, quick, easy to use, and not out
of the ALSDE’s limited budget range. Finally, they found AppAssure’s Replay
which gave them the confidence that it was going to do what it actually said it
would, explains Crews. "While I’m not from Missouri," he says,
"I love their motto – Show Me. That’s how I approached all the hype and
promises of marketing. Does the darn thing work – really work? Replay is a
product that works."

The key features that Crews and Nunnelee say to rely
on daily include Replay’s intuitive administrative console and the ability to
rapidly restore lost data.

"It’s as easy as using Windows Explorer,"
says Nunnelee, who has spent a good portion of his career wrangling difficult
administrative interfaces with other backup products. "You just
right-click, copy, and restore the data. The cataloguing is just so much better
as well, and it’s so much easier to maneuver around in than other products I’ve
worked with."

"The time to recover a file or email is under two
minutes, and the panic or fear of the user is taken away," says Crews.
"We have different servers set at various intervals for our snaps, from 15
minutes to two hours, depending on what type of recovery point objective we’ve
set for the server. And the speed of recovery every time with Replay… well, let
me just say, this is fast."

ALSDE’s IT team says they can now turn their attention
from worrying about backup and recovery, to focusing on creating a
comprehensive disaster recovery process, using Replay to replicate data
offsite. "Replay is not a product that you have to babysit; you don’t have
to make sure it’s running. With Backup Exec, we had to check and make sure it
was running after a weekend, or see if it ran out of tape, or reboot the
server. Replay has shown us that this is it – it does what it says it
does."