Rogue Community College
Rogue Community College needed a comprehensive backup solution.
December 29, 2011
Rogue Community College
Rogue Community College is a comprehensive two-year community college that serves southern Oregon and offers over seventy academic and career and technical programs, college transfer courses, and basic skills programs for adults. Rogue lies in the heart of the Rogue Valley where there is a wealth of scenic beauty, outdoor recreation, and cultural attractions. There are three campus locations in Jackson and Josephine counties in Grants Pass, Medford and White City.
Challenge
“Rogue Community College needed a comprehensive backup solution,” said Michael McClure, Rogue's director of information technology.
They were in the process of creating this solution which included setting up a disaster recovery site at a second campus with both the primary and backup sites on generators. The backup systems included a mix of tape and disk and snapshots. In the midst of creating their solution, Zetta came on the scene.
“We wanted a cloud component too, in addition to the campus-to-campus failover,” said McClure.
Alternatives
Rogue looked at other cloud options besides Zetta. “Zetta had good pricing,” explained McClure, “and we liked the fact that Zetta had a West Coast data center.”
We wanted a cloud component in addition to the campus-to-campus failover.
Rogue Community College's Zetta Solution
Zetta Data Protect includes the Zetta Storage Service, enterprise-class, secure storage managed by Zetta in multiple SAS70 II data centers and the ZettaMirror agent software that is loaded onto Rogue's servers. ZettaMirror replicates local production data into Zetta where it is available for immediate online access for data recovery or disaster scenarios. Since the data is stored at Zetta in a directly accessible format, data recovery can be near instantaneous.
Rogue is now using Zetta for offsite backup of data from the main campus in Oregon to the Zetta data center in Santa Clara, California. ZettaMirror agents are installed on eight servers and perform nightly data syncs to the Zetta data center.
The initial startup was clean and easy and McClure installed it all himself. “It was really straightforward to do, pretty easy,” remembers McClure. “It took a while for the initial upload, we just monitored it.” Several months later, Rogue had an issue with one of the clients that required restarting. “Zetta worked with us and the problem was resolved with a new release,” said McClure.
“One of the things I really like about it is the interface,” pointed out McClure. “It is a really easy portal.”
ZettaMirror automatically performs nightly backups of web services data, databases and some of the files servers to the Zetta storage service in Santa Clara, California. Only the changed portions of files are copied, encrypted and transmitted, ensuring secure and rapid transfers.
We can't do business without our imaging data online. The Zetta solution is comforting to me.
Result
Rogue is now replicating their core file server data (file shares), SQL data, and Exchange data to Zetta. Web server data and payroll services data are also replicated to Zetta. And finally, representing almost a third of the storage, Rogue replicates their document imaging repository. Rogue is very close to a paperless operation with one of the largest document imaging implementations anywhere. The imaging repository has become mission critical.
“We can't do business without our imaging data online,” said McClure. “The Zetta solution is comforting to me.”
Thankfully, Rogue has not had to respond to a full disaster scenario, but there have already been instances where local backups failed and they were able to easily retrieve data from Zetta.
“I'm very happy with the product,” concluded McClure, “both the functionality and the pricing.”
