Staff get data back just hours after fire guts The Academy, Selsey Redstor to the rescue after disaster strikes
Blaze destroys server room Redstor restores 100% of school s data
Redstor came to the rescue, restoring all of the staff and pupils data after fire ripped through The Academy, Selsey, destroying 80 per cent of the school. Head teacher Tom Garfield said: The ability to download our electronic infrastructure offsite and restore that was absolutely critical because there were enough challenges from a teaching and learning point of view without having to recreate every resource. The fire started as a result of roofing work in the summer holidays - 10 days before Tom was due to take over as the new head teacher. He said: I was phoned and told there was an issue on the roof that had been resolved. Halfway to school it was clear from the enormous plume of smoke that wasn t the case. Strong winds had blown embers on to adjacent buildings, causing the fire to spread quickly and Tom said: I arrived to find the school ablaze. We lost 80 per cent of the buildings. The disaster recovery service we received from Redstor totally exceeded our expectations." Tom Garfield, Head Teacher
Redstor s InstantData technology enables organisations to access files and the information they need immediately in the event of a disaster. In the event that live data is lost, InstantData serves it up from the cloud on demand, and with minimal effort from the user. Daniel Sapseid, the ICT Systems Manager, was contacted on the evening of the fire and within two hours, using a high-speed broadband connection, he was able to restore all the critical student and staff data that had been backed up by Redstor. All less critical data was restored in an additional eight to ten hours. The only reason it wasn t faster was a low-speed USB external hard-drive was used for part of the restore process. Daniel said: A member of the Redstor team visited us onsite and assisted us with a full restore which made the process a lot smoother.
Eliminating downtime
Redstor enables organisations to recover physical, virtual or cloudhosted machines to VMware or Hyper-V in just a few clicks and keep on working. Daniel Sapseid, ICT Systems Manager, said: I don t even want to think about what the implications would have been, had we not been able to get the data back it may well have been my head on the chopping block. Redstor were amazing in supporting with the restore of the data. They sent one of their lead engineers down to help support with the restore. Once I got the new hardware on site, the first server was restored within the hour. That meant I could then provision all the extra servers that I needed to prepare for the restore of all the other servers and start to give the data back to the senior team with the contact details for the staff and students. The school s staff were thrilled that they didn t lose any work at all from the network. Unlike other disaster recovery solutions, there s no need to restore all of an organisation s data from Redstor before anyone can begin operating again. With InstantData the most critical files, the ones users need to access first, can be streamed immediately and on demand allowing everyone to continue working seamlessly on any device. Importantly, while staff work on these files, the remaining data will be intelligently restored in the background. So downtime and disruption are no longer an issue. InstantData restores the files that the users ask for first, so it will eliminate the downtime and staff have access to the stuff that they want almost instantly." Daniel Sapseid, ICT Systems Manager If there was to be another catastrophe here in the school, I fully expect to be able to have the data streamed back live to me - and have my staff using data pretty much immediately.
Challenges Solution Key Benefits Recovering student and staff data after fire guts 80 per cent of school Keeping school working while data is recovered High management overheads associated with managing data Difficulty finding expert support A data management solution that delivers reliable backup and recovery, archiving, disaster recovery and global search InstantData, Redstor s unique on-demand streaming technology Intelligent, policy-driven automation and sophisticated reporting with a centralised management console, offering borderless visibility of entire, complex data estate at any time, on any device Support provided by an organisation that is both the technology vendor and infrastructure owner Stream data in real time to any device, making downtime a thing of the past No need to wait for full recovery - gain immediate access to automated, encrypted and secure online backup and recovery Time spent on data management every reduced from several hours to less than 20 minutes Fast 24/7/365 access to a support team that draws on 20 years knowledge and experience within the storage and backup industry
Complete data management
With a unique solution that is multi-tenanted and built for the cloud, The Kemnal Academies Trust are able to discover, manage, control and protect the data of multiple schools with ease. Redstor unifies backup, instant-data recovery and access, archiving, search and data migration through a secure, central console, enabling borderless visibility of TKAT s entire data estate at any time, on any device. Daniel said: Prior to moving to Redstor for my backups, I was using a standard disc-to-disc-totape scenario. TKAT have a relationship with Redstor and they advised me to see the product in action. I liked what I saw and the school s data was migrated to Redstor a year before the fire. When the fire happened it fully vindicated that decision. Running on servers, laptops and workstations, with backup selections profiled from the management console, Redstor provides rapid and granular restore for Office 365 and SaaS and granular restore for Office 365 and SaaS applications. Multiple copies of backups are held securely encrypted in UK data centres. The encryption key is set by the customer, ensuring no unauthorised access. How quickly after invoking a DR plan would you actually have access to business-critical data? In minutes? In an hour? In less than two hours? In half a day? By the next day? Within two days? SEE RESULTS A liberated IT team Deployed and configured in 15 minutes, Redstor has made data management tasks smaller and simpler for Daniel and the school he supports. He said: Here at the Academy Selsey we have about 2TB worth of data on the Redstor platform that s backed up every evening. Previously I used to spend a couple of hours a week on average, managing failures and changing tapes. I would often leave the backup process to complete over the weekend and then would take the tapes home with me. Looking back, I see it wasn t the most efficient way to store critical student data as a large part of my time was spent ensuring the backups had been completed in the first place. The day-to-day management of the Redstor software requires next to no input at all. I get an email every morning with a summary of all my servers with how much data has been backed up and whether there was an issue.
I can check into logs and investigate further to solve any issue, but it s reduced my management backup time drastically to 20 minutes per week tops. I get emails every morning to say that my backups have successfully completed. So when I got a phone call from the head teacher on the evening of the fire, asking me about the location of our data, I was confident in the knowledge that it was all backed up with Redstor the night before." Daniel Sapseid
Transparent and predictable pricing
Not only are traditional backups costly, complicated and timeconsuming, they cannot scale to support the explosion in new apps and growing data sets. As well as removing manual overheads, Redstor allows TKAT to budget confidently with a pricing model that is subscription-based, simple and predictable. TKAT can now scale up or down as demand changes. There are no hidden costs, no surprises. Daniel said: The pricing model that the Redstor platform uses - where you buy for the space that you use rather than per device - means I can have multiple servers backing up. How quickly would your organisation NEED to be up and running in the event of a catastrophic disaster? In minutes? In an hour? In less than two hours? In half a day? By the next day? Within two days? SEE RESULTS The pricing, compared to alternative providers, I think is really reasonable and I wouldn t look anywhere else going forward.
Expert support
Expert support Redstor s clients have 24/7 access to a support team that draws on 20 years knowledge and experience within the storage and backup industry. If Daniel ever needs support or the answer to a query, he has the reassurance that he is speaking to an organisation that is both the technology vendor and infrastructure owner. Straight after the fire, once I got my internet connection back up and running onto the new servers, I spoke with the Redstor technical team and my account managers and they ensured that all my backups were working successfully again. It took a number of months for our leased line to be re-established. During that time I had a satellite broadband connection piggy-backing off one of our local static caravan sites. The connection on that broadband was not as good as what I was used to, but the backups still ran as I would have fully expected. Same time frames with no issues. From thereon I ve had constant contact with my account managers to make sure that I m happy with the product going forward. " Daniel Sapseid Redstor also feeds all input directly into software development. That s why the software is constantly improving in the way clients desire.
Proven and trusted tech Redstor is trusted by more than 40,000 clients around the world to help discover, analyse, control and protect their critical data. I would fully recommend the Redstor product to any school or business out there for their data management and recovery. Head teacher Tom Garfield added: Having been through that level of catastrophe, I think we are safe in the knowledge that we can bring more things into a digital storage solution and be more protected. We are moving away from paper storage files for student records and actually moving into an area where they are digitally stored. We now appreciate that the service that Redstor is able to offer is so secure and so comprehensive that there is no risk, whereas a hard-copy filing system just presents the opportunity for things like the fire to decimate those key areas that we need. So we are expanding our use of what Redstor is able to offer. "Redstor as a company have supported the school and myself throughout. All of their staff are very personable and approachable and I just cannot recommend the product highly enough. Daniel Sapseid
Thank you for reading Selsey Academy Case Study Cookies Terms [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Privacy [ 1 ] [ 2 ] POWERED BY