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Overland Storage helps the university of naples protect five terabytes of critical data
Overland Storage Reo 4000 disk-based back-up and recovery appliance and Neo 2000 library ensure data back up for leading Italian university
Overland Storage, a provider of backup and recovery solutions, today announced that the University of Naples 'Federico II' has deployed its Reo 4000 disk-based back-up and recovery appliance and Neo 2000 library to protect five terabytes of data generated by its 8,000 staff and 130,000 students. Thanks to Overland Storage, the university - which is legally required to offer its students 24/7 data availability despite the IT infrastructure is unmanned every day between the hours of 8:00 pm and 7:00 am every day - can now easily back up all its data in less than half the time it took before this deployment.
Prior to the installation of the Reo 4000 and Neo 2000, the two administrators were backing up the central campus data directly to tape and the entire procedure took five days each time. Moreover, the data residing in the Montesantangelo remote branch of the university had a purely nominal monthly back up process in place. In early 2006 the two infrastructures were consolidated and the team started seeking an easier yet more efficient back up strategy to back up the remote site to local disk and then to the tape library in the main campus.
The University of Naples therefore installed a Reo 4000 disk-based back up and recovery appliance in the Montesantangelo remote branch and a Neo 2000 tape library in the central campus to back up the 5 terabytes of data including the web servers, student applications and email. 'Choosing Overland was not difficult. I could not afford to take on two more back up administrators to run the remote site and the Neo and Reo allow the current operators to easily manage the entire system from a central location,' said Giovanni Barone PhD, head of the IT team at the University of Naples.
The selection criteria were cost-effectiveness, a wide range of features such as modularity, high scalability, and support for Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Ethernet, as well as reliability. The university needed an open system; depending on how mission-critical the data was it resided on the SAN (80%), NAS (18%), or DAS (2%) devices. In addition, a number of Operating Systems were deployed and any new solution should be compatible with all of them.
Through the Overland solutions, today the university of Naples can retrieve data in less than 30 minutes thanks to a sound back-up strategy. Barone remarked 'If our Montesantangelo remote branch experiences a loss of data they can now easily and quickly retrieve the copy at our central campus, and next year we will add a second Reo appliance to deploy a bi-directional back up strategy that allows us to store a copy of the main office data in our remote branch for extra protection.'
'The University of Naples presented a significant challenge because of the heterogeneous existing environment, the demanding and broad selection criteria as well as the high reliability required by the system,' said Chris James, marketing director EMEA at Overland Storage. 'Our Reo and Neo appliances however easily ticked all the boxes giving the IT staff piece of mind and enabling them to focus on providing students and staff continuous and reliable access to data.'
'The unique combination of features, reliability and cost has really made Overland they ideal solution for the university. The protocol versatility of the Neo tape library and the scalability of the Reo disk appliance are just two of the reasons why we have chosen Overland,' continues Barone. 'The Reo 4000 and Neo 2000 have been providing us with such a smooth performance that we can't imagine how we could have carried on without them today.'
The D2D set up immediately reduced the back up process from five to two days, a significant drop of 60 percent. The migration of data to tape, which still takes five days, is now done in the background without the concern of glitches happening to the only copy of the data along the way. 07.09.2006, Maria Hotjakov, Overland Storage GmbH
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