The Town of Dedham
Zetta took a lot of pressure off us. Before, we were going home at night worrying a lot.
August 12, 2011
The Town of Dedham
The Town of Dedham, Massachusetts was settled in 1635 and incorporated in 1636. Located about twelve miles southwest of Boston, it is the county seat of Norfolk County. At the first public meeting on August 15, 1636, eighteen men signed the town covenant. The town currently has a population of about 25,000. The first man-made canal in North America, Mother Brook, was created in Dedham in 1639. In 1643, Dedham authorized the first taxpayer-funded public school, "the seed of American education."
Challenge
Veronica Barnes, Director of Technology for the Town of Dedham, was looking forward. Entrusted with delivering IT services to the town, she was uncomfortable with the town's ability to withstand an IT outage and was looking for another site in case of a natural disaster. "The number of recent disasters in other parts of the country, including one here in another part of Maine, really raised my level of urgency," claimed Barnes.
The town was doing backups to local tapes, so their data was safe, but that did not provide a total, reasonably quick solution to return access to data in the event of a disaster.
As Barnes began to research options for a more robust disaster recovery solution, she read about Zetta.
Coincidentally, she was also contacted by Zetta. Timing was perfect, and so was the Zetta solution.
The number of recent disasters in other parts of the country really raised my level of urgency.
It took less than a minute to install a ZettaMirror agent, and everything showed up live.
We like what we see and how easy it was to implement and integrate.
The Town of Dedham's Zetta Solution
The town is now using ZettaMirror to backup and offsite much of their critical data. They installed ZettaMirror inside of multiple Windows and Linux virtual machines, currently about six, to back up the user files. They are also protecting GIS data and SQL data as well as files.
"It took less than a minute to install a ZettaMirror agent, and everything showed up live," claimed Christopher Pohl, Assistant Director of Technology for the town. "There were no problems."
ZettaMirror automatically replicates and then keeps synchronized the local data offsite into the Zetta Storage Service where it is recreated in a ready-to-access file system that "mirrors" the local file system. The data is transferred and stored in encrypted format and protected against multiple hardware failures, so it is always safe and secure.
ZettaMirror automatically synchronizes changes to the data, so there is always a current, recoverable copy available. Access to the Zetta data is immediate through either an Internet browser or by directly mounting the remote file system.
"We like what we see and how easy it was to implement and integrate," said Pohl. The system has been running so well, that the town is planning to implement new financial and general ledger systems and will use Zetta to back those up from the start. This will entail adding ZettaMirror into another twenty virtual servers over the next four months. "We're planning to push out everything to Zetta," said Pohl.
Result
Fortunately, the town has not had a disaster where they have had to recover from Zetta, yet, but they have gone online and checked that the file level recovery is working and ready for business. On the technical side, the town was happy with the way Zetta integrates with their existing virtual server and file server environment. "Zetta was very low impact to operations and very low impact to our bandwidth," stated Pohl.
In a parting comment, Barnes said, "Zetta took a lot of pressure off us. Before, we were going home at night worrying a lot."
