North Wiltshire District Council has ditched Symantec in favour of a back-up solution from BakBone Software.
Data is the lifeblood of any organisation but particularly so for councils like North Wiltshire, which is expected to access tax, housing benefit information and payroll specifics at the mere touch of a button.
However, the council encountered problems with the previous incumbent solution, meaning its 400 employees - spread across three main sites weren't as responsive as they needed or wanted to be. More so, it wanted something that would complement its key business continuity strategy and work with its 14TB disk storage array and tape library.
"We were finding it impossible to recover or replicate data and to run reports; the existing software no longer met our needs, and at times even lost contact with client machines," said John Manley, the council's ICT service delivery manager, at Storage Expo in London today.
"With increasing 24/7 demands on the system, centralising the backups and improving the reporting capabilities were key for us. We needed a best-in-class data protection strategy."
To that end, the council has NetVault: Backup 8.1, claiming that "every aspect of our data protection strategy has improved, without a doubt."
Manley added: "The ease of recovery using NetVault:Backup is simply magic, and the restores are so quick. We also impressed our auditors who found that our disaster recovery plan worked exceptionally smoothly. We are now able to back up nearly six terabytes of data every day across a wide range of platforms and applications, including UNIX, SQL, Oracle and Notes.
"In terms of cost, we have saved money on initial hardware purchases; consumables, such as tapes; and also maintenance."
