Stockport Grammar; Ensuring Back Up Success into the Future

The RM Education Disk to Disk to Tape backup solution makes backing up your information easier, quicker and worry free. It helps ensure that data is safe should there be a need to recover important school, teacher or pupil files and information.

Back up is a huge issue facing many schools; it can often seem like a daunting prospect. The frightening idea that should something terrible happen to your school all the hard work of the pupils and teachers would be lost is enough to mean that back up is becoming a huge priority for all network managers.

Stockport grammar is a 1400 pupil, independent mixed school, near Manchester. Paul Roebuck, Network Manager discusses his thoughts about his RM Disk to Disk to Tape backup solution.

Thorough back up takes time
He explains the backup issues he had been facing in the past; "I have always used tapes, but when you are backing up a whole server, that can take a long time," explains Paul, "Retrieving lost data can be difficult as you have to scroll through each tape in turn to find the data you want."

The solution

The RM disk to disk to tape solution used at Stockport Grammar is an RM disk box and a tape drive. Data is backed up quickly from the servers to the disk box, minimising impact on network performance. Then the backed up disc data is moved from the disk box to the tape drive, a longer process. Once completed, the tapes can be removed from the school and securely stored. This 2 step process means less server resource is used for backing up every night, and that there is a more robust backup solution.

It's straight forward to use

Paul found the solution straight forward to use, "I pretty much leave it to its own devices," he says, "I am confident that when I return in the morning, the data will be backed up, I check it every morning for peace of mind, but the machine just gets on with what its meant to do. When I have to retrieve data, I can usually get it form the diskbox; it really is easy!"

Faster, easier and less complex

When Paul heard about the disk to disk to tape solution he was immediately interested, "It just sounded like a great idea: using the disk box to act as a staging post for the data immediately means faster back up. Also, it means I can connect the one back up device to a few different servers; that has decreased the complexity of my back up and the number of my headaches!"

The Future

Paul is keen to see what's next in the RM Education portfolio, "I will be interested to see the future of backup at RM." RM Education is constantly evaluating new technologies and people like Paul are invaluable for opinion and identification of trends. As we've seen, with media rich classes becoming more popular, and with a growing amount of pupil data, back up will become even more of a business critical activity for the network management team.