Data protection is no easy feat in the world of higher education. Recognizing retention periods for varying sets of data, determining required recovery times for each set, and mitigating data loss can be daunting tasks. Not to mention, you are often protecting a wide array of data while supporting thousands of users that range from those who are just sending personal emails to those conducting the most delicate of research projects And, when something goes wrong, it’s likely you’ll be inundated with a flood of complaints.
But instead of focusing on a reactive situation, let’s turn our attention to the objective of complaint prevention.
The very simple steps of a thorough data protection strategy are so often overlooked. Where does an IT professional supporting a higher education institution really need to start? It’s more than just understanding your data sets. Your team should really put the following in writing for each set and adhere to it:
Retention period
Recovery time objectives
Amount of acceptable data loss
Let’s take a quick look at retention periods for a typical academic computing environment. Thinking this through will help you get data to the correct, most cost-effective storage medium and determine your method for storing it on that medium. You will likely have at least some of the following data sets. As an example, I asked BakBone customer, Martin FrankhouseatUniversity of Detroit Mercy, for an overview of his typical retention periods, knowing that these definitely vary from institution to institution.
Student Activities – 90 days
Student email – 90 days
Course content – 3 years
Catalogs – 10 years plus
Grades – Decades
Research Projects – Potentially decades
Recovery time objectives could actually run on the same scale as your retention periods. For example, student email may have a short retention period and likely have a short recovery time objective. It may not be important enough for long term storage, but you better be able to get it back up and running fast in the event of downtime. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not enough to simply lay out a plan on paper for meeting recovery time and recovery point objectives. To minimize downtime and data loss in a real-world situation, it’s crucial to plan before disaster strikes. As our experts discuss, this planning includes classifying your data and applications, setting internal expectations for RTOs and RPOs, and testing your plan.
Featured experts include Stephen Wynkoop, Microsoft SQL Server MVP; Robby Wright, Chief Technical Consultant from Abtech; Dennis Martin, President of Demartek; and Mark LeBlanc, Network Specialist at the Edmonton Public Library.
In this podcast, BakBone customer Noah Dionne from DeLorme shares his story of putting BakBone’s deduplication technology to work at this leading mapping and GPS solutions company. With NetVault: SmartDisk, DeLorme is able to compress their data and save space and money spent on storage drives. Dionne says, “With the money we saved on tapes, we were able to cover the licensing costs of the SmartDisk solution, which offers more benefits than tape backup.”
“NetVault: FASTRecover’s 30-second recovery performance will help increase our company’s productivity and help us continue to meet our clients’ needs. The simple and easy-to-use interface has freed me from the unneeded stress and problems of everyday IT administration.” ~ RH Kwon, Systems Operator of Heerim Architects
The Challenge: With many independent file servers allotted for each project team and hundreds of projects constantly in progress, it was critical for Heerim Architects to protect their data and minimize business interruption. Construction Management and architectural drawings were stored on data servers that contained sub-divided data storage space for saving prototypes separately. The new and old data, which included architectural drawings, required full data protection as well as a system that could manage the history of changes and modifications to these files. Heerim’s old backup solution caused too many backup windows and was increasing data recovery costs for the company.
The Solution: Heerim selected NetVault: FASTRecover for real-time data protection based on its 30-second recovery capabilities, which makes it possible to go back to any-point-in-time to quickly retrieve consistent data. This was not possible with their old solution. The fast availability of data after recovery (BakBone’s Virtual On-Demand Recovery technology) was another feature that Heerim looked to employ in their data center because it would minimize downtime.
The Benefit: NetVault: FASTRecover enabled Heerim to protect critical data in real-time and eliminate backup windows. And FASTRecover’s easy-to-use interface reduces the level of expertise for system administrators to perform data recoveries. The high availability of information after recovery also limits operational downtime.
In this podcast, BakBone customer Derek Kruger discusses the challenges he faced with his old backup solution and why he switched to NetVault: FASTRecover. He shares with us how FASTRecover helps keep the city’s financial databases up and running, how it has eliminated backup windows and how the product works quietly behind the scenes to keep Exchange and SQL data available for the employees and citizens of Safford. “No one cares if you back anything up, all they care is if you can get it back to them when they ask for it,” Derek says.
