4-page Case Study - Posted 11/7/2007
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School District Consolidates Backup Systems, Reduces IT Workload, and Lowers Costs
Tracy Unified School District in northern California wanted to streamline the work involved in daily backups and file recoveries. The small IT staff spent an inordinate amount of time backing up e-mail messages and documents every day for the district’s 22 schools and could spend days recovering accidentally deleted files or messages. The district deployed Microsoft® System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, a disk-and-tape backup system, to replace two tape-based systems. Today, Tracy Unified School District rests easier knowing that its Microsoft messaging and collaboration workloads are safeguarded by a Microsoft backup solution. The IT staff no longer worries about backups and has decreased its backup-related work by six hours per week. Students and staff receive recovered files faster, and the district has reduced backup-related costs by more than U.S.$40,000 annually.
Situation
Tracy, California, is a fast-growing community of around 74,000 in the Central San Joaquin Valley, 60 miles east of San Francisco and an hour south of Sacramento. Its school district has struggled to keep up with community growth in the face of diminishing budgets. For example, the district’s already-small IT staff shrank by several people in recent years due to budget cuts, while user numbers, service demands, and workload continue to rise. Today, Tracy Unified School District has 1,600 employees working in the district office and in its 22 schools, serving 16,000 students.
Sara Windsor, Senior Network Engineer for Tracy Unified School District, explains how the district zeroed in on its backup procedures as a way to reduce IT workloads. “Just two of us manage backups for 22 schools and the district office, and we were spending too much time each day on backup issues,” she says. “We wanted to spend more time on higher-value activities such as enhancing our communications infrastructure, expanding our collaboration infrastructure, and tightening network security. We needed to find a more solid backup solution that would allow us to manage more efficiently.”
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I finally have an enterprise backup product that I can use to centrally manage all our workloads. It has delivered a huge timesaving. |
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Sara Windsor
Senior Network Engineer, Tracy Unified School District |
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The district was saddled with two tape backup solutions for different areas of its data center. One individual had purchased Veritas Backup Exec version 10 (now called Symantec Backup Exec) for file server backups, and someone else had purchased CommVault Qinetix version 5.9 for the district’s Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 files. “These products were basically doing the same thing for different server workloads,” Windsor says. “We had two different products to support and two people doing redundant activities every day. We needed a single, centrally organized solution.”
Each of the tape-based solutions had time-consuming weaknesses, in Windsor’s view. “The Veritas solution worked okay but was so bandwidth-hungry that we had to run file-server backups at night,” she says. “CommVault Qinetix is a fine product, but installation was complex, and our deep SharePoint site hierarchy made backup and recovery difficult and inconsistent, especially for single items. The product required a lot of care and feeding. All in all, we probably spent up to eight hours each week on manual backup chores and backup jobs took about 87 hours each week to run.”
On top of backup-related chores, the IT staff lost hours to file-recovery tasks. Occasionally, users accidentally deleted files or e-mail messages and wanted them reinstated. Or, users would request a deleted document from a SharePoint site, which required the restoration of the entire portal. “It required hours or even days to fulfill some of these requests, which put us even further behind in our work,” Windsor says.
Solution
The local Microsoft account team invited Tracy Unified School District to join the Microsoft® Technology Adoption Program for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 in August 2006 at the same time it was testing Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 is a disk and tape-based backup solution that continuously safeguards changed files at the byte level by copying them to a secondary disk and later to tape.
“I had never heard of Data Protection Manager, but Microsoft suggested it, and it sounded really appealing,” Windsor said. “We have a solid Microsoft infrastructure, and I was excited about a good backup product that was developed and supported specifically for Microsoft workloads. Plus, I would have Microsoft support to help resolve any backup issues. ”
Because Windsor and her colleagues were so busy, they didn’t evaluate other backup products, but they had been looking at better ways to meet disaster-recovery and legal-retention needs and knew that System Center Data Protection Manager would help there. “Data Protection Manager plays well into our disaster-recovery plans,” Windsor says. “It has great long-term retention features, which will help us get our offsite retention procedures in place, and it offers very easy long-term backup scheduling. With CommVault Qinetix, you really had to think out your whole tape rotation scheme. With System Center Data Protection Manager, you only have to know that you want to keep a set of data for a year and send it offsite every week; Data Protection Manager figures out the scheduling. That’s a big timesaver for disaster-recovery planning.”
The district quickly deployed System Center Data Protection Manager on a single server computer running the Windows Server® 2003 operating system, and the software is now safeguarding 900 gigabytes of data on 38 servers—19 school-based file servers, 2 Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 servers, 3 Exchange Server 2007 servers (the district recently upgraded from Exchange Server 2003), 7 domain controllers, and 7 application servers. The district plans to deploy a second System Center Data Protection Manager server to provide backup to the primary one for disaster recovery.
Next, the district plans to use System Center Data Protection Manager to back up four of the district’s Microsoft SQL Server™ databases, which contain back-end data for the district’s student information system, student lunch accounts, and other important school applications. The district is also upgrading to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which will also be safeguarded by System Center Data Protection Manager. “Moving SQL Server and Office SharePoint Server 2007 workloads under Data Protection Manager will allow us to centralize all our Microsoft workloads under one backup program, which will deliver huge efficiencies and peace of mind,” Windsor says.
The district has eliminated the CommVault and Veritas tape backup solutions altogether and the ten tape drives and tapes associated with them. Windsor and her colleagues now have just two tape libraries and a storage area network, which they manage using a single System Center Data Protection Manager console. “We no longer need to manually swap tapes or juggle multiple backup interfaces,” Windsor says. “We perform quick file recoveries from disk and longer-term recoveries from tapes.”
Also, using the System Center Data Protection Manager byte-level backup feature, the district can back up only the bytes of files that have changed since the previous backup, instead of backing up entire files. Because far less data is transferred, the district can back up data daily, or even hourly, without affecting the performance of production servers.
Benefits
By implementing Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, the Tracy Unified School District gained a single, centralized backup solution that freed it to retire disparate tape backup products and eliminate the associated licensing and support fees. With the new disk-based backup solution, the IT staff has been able to reduce its backup-related chores by about six hours per week, which provides more time to enhance the district’s network and technology capabilities. Users are happier to have immediate restoration of lost files, and the IT staff is pleased to save the budget-constrained district more than U.S.$40,000 annually .
Easy, Centralized Backup Management
By implementing System Center Data Protection Manager, Windsor and her colleagues have streamlined the district’s time-consuming backup products and procedures. “System Center Data Protection Manager has been fantastic. It was very easy to install, it’s been a really consistent product, and support has been great,” Windsor says. “I finally have an enterprise backup product that I can use to centrally manage all our workloads. It has delivered a huge timesaving.”
Instead of running backups on stand-alone drives and manually swapping tapes, the district now has a single enterprise backup solution that is tightly integrated with the workloads it’s safeguarding. “Our Exchange Server and Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 backups used to require constant care and feeding. That’s now gone. Our time spent on backup chores has dropped from 34 to about 8 hours per month.”
The time needed to run backup jobs has also decreased dramatically, from 350 to 60 hours per month. With network and server resources freed from time-intensive backup activities, they’re available for other tasks.
With the efficiencies gained by deploying System Center Data Protection Manager, the IT staff has more time to devote to new projects that support better teaching and learning and improve network security. “Our small IT staff is stretched in many different directions; backup is just one of our concerns,” Windsor says. “Now we don’t have to deal with two different products. Before, we had constant concerns about backups finishing successfully or recovering files properly. Backups are something that we no longer worry about.”
A key timesaving feature of System Center Data Protection Manager is its ability to perform granular Exchange Server 2007 and (soon) Office SharePoint Server 2007 recoveries. Using this brick-level recovery capability, Windsor can easily recover a single Exchange Server 2007 mailbox in minutes, versus the hours or days it took before. “The ease of recovery is fantastic,” she says. “Plus, it’s the first time I’ve had a backup product that I could sync every hour, versus from the night before, which gives us much more current backups.”
During the district’s migration to Exchange Server 2007, Windsor inadvertently removed Exchange Server attributes from five active accounts, causing their e-mail and voice-mail messages to vanish. She used System Center Data Protection Manager to restore a recent backup (made less than an hour before), created new mailboxes, and merged the contents of each back in. “What could have been a major disaster with an all-night recovery process turned into a couple of hours of work,” Windsor says. “The only reason it took a couple of hours was that the five mailboxes were in five different storage groups. It took System Center Data Protection Manager only 15 minutes to restore each database.”
Windsor uses the intuitive System Center Data Protection Manager console and reporting capability to keep tabs on backups and to perform file recoveries with point-and-click simplicity. “I’ve been able to jump in and figure out capabilities without reading a manual,” Windsor says. “The reports are wonderful, especially for dealing with tape rotations. From one brief Data Protection Manager report, I can determine precisely which tapes are ready to be sent offsite, their barcodes, and the schedule. When you do a file recovery, you just tell Data Protection Manager which file you want to recover, and it tells you which tape to retrieve. From a management perspective, it’s one less thing to worry about.”
$40,000 Annual Savings
Windsor estimates that the district’s deployment of System Center Data Protection Manager will save the district $40,000 annually, distributed as follows:
IT admin time savings $13,731
Backup system support savings $18,600
Tape media savings $7,900
“We’re thrilled to have realized such significant savings in a little over a year’s time with our rollout of System Center Data Protection Manager,” Windsor says. “In the current climate of shrinking budgets, Data Protection Manager is helping to stretch our IT dollars even more as we strive to provide robust and stable network services for both students and staff.”
Higher User Satisfaction
While file recoveries aren’t something that the IT staff has to deal with every day, the staff is still obligated to safeguard the staff’s and students’ critical files, e-mail messages, and Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 content. “There have been times when we simply could not recover a file for a teacher or student, because the backup from the previous night had failed,” Windsor says. “There were other times when it would take hours or days to get back what was needed. Now, students and staff aren’t waiting for the IT staff to recover their files; we can recover them immediately. They’re much happier with the IT staff and able to get on with their work.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
Microsoft System Center
Microsoft® System Center is a family of leading IT management solutions that helps you proactively plan, deploy, manage, and optimize your IT environment. System Center solutions capture and aggregate knowledge about your infrastructure, policies, processes, and best practices so your IT staff can build manageable systems and automate operations in order to reduce costs, improve application availability, and enhance service delivery.
For more information about the System Center family of solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/systemcenter
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Tracy Unified School District products and services, call (209) 830-3282 or visit the Web site at:
www.tracy.k12.ca.us
