Pewaukee, Wis. - There’s no longer any reason to keep the credit union’s back-up media underneath the mattress at home, according to Dustin Stone, director, information systems, Wisconsin Credit Union League.
But up until four months ago, Stone wasn’t quite sure where to securely store the league’s tapes–so he kept them under lock and key in a fireproof box on site here.
“It made me lose a little sleep knowing we never took our tapes off-site,” Stone said, explaining that if a disaster had taken out the building or made it inaccessible, the back-ups would have been useless. “Taking data off-site has been a big discussion since I got into IT ten years ago. You had to make a copy of your data and send it off site or take it home, which isn’t secure.”
Now, for $200 per month, the league can automatically back-up 50 gigabytes of data in real-time to a remote site at MozyEnterprise, a secure, online service provided by EMC Corp.
That 50 gigs represents the league and its 270 members’ database and file data–the “two most important servers. But we’ll ramp it up to include all of our data, which is about 150 gigabytes,” and represents additional mail and Apple Mac servers, said Stone.
Mozy ensures disaster recovery, whereas the league sticks to its physical tape back-up system for run-of-the-mill “fast backups and restores,” Stone said. “It’s a parallel back-up scheme. Mozy is our last resort if something really bad happens.
“Mozy eliminates a big worry in the industry,” continued Stone. “With the proliferation of bandwidth, it makes it so easy. It just runs in the background and does its thing.”
Because the league’s data is saved to Mozy throughout the day, network users don’t notice any change in bandwidth or computing performance, he said.
In contrast, a full, 150-gigabyte back-up to tape takes six to seven hours, one time every night. Stone said Mozy “pays for itself very quickly,” as well.
The league pays about $200 per month for the software-as-a-service offering, he said. In contrast, the tape drive cost the league $3,000, and it pays up to $60 per tape, said Stone. “Maybe down the road we’ll not replace the back-up tapes and just use Mozy.”
Although Mozy can be rolled-out to the league’s 35 desktops to automatically back-up local hard drives, Stone said it’s not necessary. “It’s a matter of culture for us,” he explained. “We just ask all users to keep their documents in their My Documents folder. Then we use Windows tools to redirect folders and personal stuff to the network and synchronize it. We do our best to get everything on the network because that’s where it’s safest. We don’t worry too much about local drives because most of what our people do is on our database or our mail server. And our data isn’t really sensitive. In most cases we work with demographic data, not non-public data,” Stone continued.
The league’s configuration is typical for new customers, according to Vance Checketts, COO at Mozy. “But we see customers moving Mozy out to the desktops after a few months so that users don’t have to make sure data is in the right place and the organization gets better protection.”
Mozy will release business backups for Apple Mac environments this summer, Checketts added. “There’s a crying need for it.”
MORE
Read more about remote back-ups at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
How Virtualization Is Being Deployed To Cut Costs, Speed Back-Up
Fires Only Serve To Reinforce Value of Document Management
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Project: Disaster Recovery
For info on this story:
* www.emc.com/mozyenterprise
* www.theleague.coop(c) 2008 The Credit Union Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.http://www.cujournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
