FalconStor CDP for Bradford Grammar School

FalconStor Software, Inc. announced the deployment of the FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) solution at Bradford Grammar School, a private school in England, to provide Disaster Recovery (DR) functionality for the school’s extensive IT infrastructure.

"Information technology is pervasive throughout the school – it’s used to teach virtually every subject and its use increases continuously. Students also submit crucial coursework electronically, and we must treat it as irreplaceable," said Simon Marriott, IT Manager at the Bradford Grammar School. "In such circumstances, a school’s IT infrastructure is not a luxury, but is as mission-critical as it might be in a commercial environment. That makes the decision to deploy enterprise-grade data protection the only sensible course of action, and FalconStor delivers the reliability we need at an affordable price."

The school uses three key options available in the FalconStor CDP. These options comprise FalconStor Continuous Data Replication (CDR); application-aware Snapshot Agents; and the FalconStor TimeMark option:

• CDR ensures that a remote disk is an exact copy of an identified disk and is kept continually updated with data changes. In the event of a primary disk failure at the school, the remote copy can be accessed to maintain data integrity.
• Snapshot Agents ensure active data stores are protected. Complete data and transactional integrity is attained through a robust and automated process that safely and reliably takes snapshots of the data stores for point-in-time copy purposes, third-party backup applications, and disaster recovery planning. This means that the data store copy can be brought online without going through any lengthy data store rebuild process to roll-back partial transactions, thus saving many hours of valuable and expensive time in the event of a disaster.
• The TimeMark option provides the school’s IT manager with the ability to instantly recover a single file or an entire volume back to a known good point in time. It creates periodic, scheduled or on-demand point-in-time delta snapshot copies of data volumes. These delta snapshots contain only data changes and therefore do not take up a significant amount of disk storage space. Up to 256 delta snapshots can be maintained per volume.

These options complement the existing data backup-to-tape processes: a full daily backup of 4.5TB of data on Dot Hill and IBM SAN storage subsystems.

FalconStor’s partner in the deployment was ANS Group, a technology infrastructure specialist in the provisioning of hardware, software and 24/7 managed services to enterprises. Scott Fletcher, chairman of ANS Group, said, "It’s impossible to overestimate how important IT infrastructure is in education nowadays. The ability to protect data is clearly essential because IT is used to such an extent in the teaching and administration of schools and because student coursework, which directly contributes to their academic qualifications, is all securely stored by the school."

Bradford Grammar School

ANS Group Plc

FalconStor Software, Inc.