Merced College Replaces Tapes With Help of Zetta

Zetta, Inc., a provider of
3-in-1 online server backup solutions, announced that Merced College has selected Zetta.net for
server backup and DR.

The community college has deployed Zetta.net DataProtect to speed data recovery while reducing the cost of campus-wide data protection.

California’s college serves more than 17,000 students with
500 faculty and adjunct professors and another 200 staff members. The
college’s data center had rapidly grown to the point where its traditional
tape-based system was no longer a viable option. With 65 virtual servers,
another 30 physical servers and 24TB in SAN storage, a more reliable and
economical backup and DR solution was needed.

"We were dealing with the
highly manual and time consuming process of storing tapes and tapes that were
aging out," said Don Peterson, director of IT, Merced College. "The system wasn’t meeting our needs, and
traditional disk-to-disk systems required a large, outright investment that was
simply beyond our budget. We soon began to evaluate our options for online
backup."

Peterson’s IT staff initiated its evaluations with the goal of finding a
secure, reliable and economical solution that would eliminate performance
bottlenecks of working with tape. They also wanted the ability to go back at
any point in time to recover files or restore machines that might go down.

Today, Merced College is using Zetta.net to achieve backup and DR for 80% of
its live server data, including virtual machines, SQL and files. The college
has eliminated having to purchase costly backup hardware and software, while
eliminating the need to manage backup tapes. When restores are required, the
college has confidence in knowing files can be recovered with ease.

"We’re saving an enormous amount of
time compared to our old system which required many hours to manage, and
restoring data could take days," said Arlis Brotner, network manager,
Merced College. "With Zetta.net,
there’s very little to maintain and not only can we recover at any point in
time, we have almost immediate access to files when needed. We’re definitely
getting a lot more value for much less cost."

"Our customers have found that
integrated 3-in-1 backup that includes online backup, DR and archiving is ideal
for replacing tape-based systems or the heavy investment of disk-to-disk,"
said Gary Sevounts, VP of marketing, Zetta.net. "With Zetta.net they get the full functionality of backup, DR and
archiving, all in one solution – an unparalleled value in today’s market."