"I'll never use tape again," said Jonathan Ferrara, IT director at
the Revere School District in Massachusetts. Ferrara has used a
variety of backup packages, including Symantec Inc.'s Backup Exec
and Microsoft NT Backup, but with processes failing to complete or
tapes failing, "there was always some sort of problem," he said.
That led Ferrara to try outsourcing backup by sending encrypted
backup streams across the Internet to a local hosting center, which
in turn mirrored the data to North Carolina. "It worked great," he
recalled. But after only about a year of use, Ferrara received a
bill that was $10,000 more than his initial budget. "I just
couldn't justify the cost."
Complicating the task were the purchasing procedures Ferrara had to
follow. As a state agency, the district can choose to work with any
vendor certified by the state's Operational Services Division; if a
vendor isn't on that list, it must try to procure a contract from
the lowest bidder. Ferrara's outsourcing provider lost that
state-approved vendor status because it failed to complete the
necessary paperwork.
Ferrara decided his best bet was to bring backup in-house once
again, only this time without including tape as part of the
equation. His Internet research led him to SonicWall Inc. CDP, a
continuous data protection product.
"SonicWall was a trusted name for us," Ferrara said -- the
district had used the vendor's firewall products in the past -- and
he was able to find a reseller on the state contract list that sold
SonicWall CDP.
The product, which SonicWall acquired from Lasso Logic Inc. last
year, is a disk-based backup platform that copies files as they're
written, rather than running a scheduled job. He purchased two
units for two separate schools and currently uses it to back up 31
servers.
The Revere School District truly put SonicWall CDP to the test
this summer. The disk drive died in the server housing the
district's identity management application, which contains
information on 6,000 students. Using SonicWall CDP, Ferrara
estimated that he was able to get data back in about 30
minutes.
Going forward, Ferrara hopes SonicWall CDP will add the ability
to perform remote replication data between units in case of a
catastrophe.
Unlike SonicWall, other CDP vendors, like Revivio Inc., have
traditionally focused on high-end enterprise database environments.
But SonicWall's small business focus may be catching on. This
summer, IBM announced that it would sell its Tivoli Continuous Data
Protection for Files through retailers, such as Circuit City,
CompUSA, Office Max and Staples.