Saints stay on the Ball
Published May 2, 2008 at 3:01 pm · Filed under Comms / IT
Northampton Saints stay on the ball with Asigra
As is the case with many small and medium-sized organisations, it took a disastrous data loss for Northampton Saints Rugby Club to implement a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.
After experiencing a major IT disaster two years ago, the club decided to ditch its laborious and unreliable tape-based backup solution and move over to an automated and online system that would allow the fast retrieval of lost data with minimal disruption to the business.
The Club now uses an online backup and recovery system managed by DataStore365 to protect its sensitive and critical data, including video analysis of players and the opposition, retail data from the two stadium shops, emails, players’ contracts and medical records, and accounting data.
Secure online backup provider DataStore365 uses Asigra software to carry out automated backups of 120GB of stored data from three Windows 2003 servers, including an Active Directory server, a Microsoft Exchange SQL server and a general file server.
A single Asigra Televaulting DS-Client discovers all servers, desktops and laptops connected to the local network, and automates the backup of all local data assets without the need for additional software to be installed on any machine.
Before the backup data set is transmitted to the Datastore365 data centres, the Asigra Televaulting software analyses the data, finds new and changed file blocks from the previous backup, eliminates duplicate files and further compresses the residue bytes to ensure the backup set is as compact as possible.
The software then encrypts the data before sending it over an IP- WAN connection to a centralised Asigra Televaulting DS-System server, located in Datastore365’s primary data centre on the Brackmills industrial estate in Northampton. For added security, the data is mirrored to a second Datastore365 data centre based on the old US Airforce base at Greenham Common, Berkshire.
The Saints have also subscribed to Asigra’s bare metal restore (BMR) solution, which will allow Datastore365 to recover lost, damaged or corrupted data in a highly streamlined fashion to any bare metal system without having to manually reinstall operating systems or configure hardware prior to use. Datastore365 can restore the complete system on new hardware including local data, user profiles, registry/system state, service pack files and encrypted files.
