Data Restores for the Alabama State Department of Education Go from 24 Hours to Two Minutes by Switching from Backup Exec to Dell AppAssure

(Dell AppAssure’s innovative software permits VMware backup, Windows Server backup, Microsoft Exchange backup, Microsoft SQL Server backup which goes beyond protecting your data by protecting your entire application.)

Business Challenge

With over 33 departments, 133 or so school systems, and some 500+ employees, the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) is the state agency providing oversight for the 1300+ schools throughout Alabama. From child nutrition to special education, from teacher certification to pupil transportation, ALSDE works closely with the county and city educational systems to guarantee that Alabama’s children get a solid education. Alabama is the only state in the US that has a single student management system coordinating student grades, attendance, teacher reporting, and systemic live enrollment.

With ALSDE’s forward thinking and commitment to its students, Network Manager Scott Crews and Backup Administrator Lloyd Nunnelee knew that the backup and disaster recovery solution they were using, Backup Exec, just wasn’t making the grade.

“We were using Symantec’s Backup Exec and there were two primary issues – the tapes were expensive and recovery was just too slow,” says Crews. “If you had to recover a file and you had the tape onsite, it might take two hours – on a good day.” Nunnelee goes on to say, “That’s the best case scenario. That’s only if the user knew when the file was last saved and we still had the information onsite. But after two weeks when we had taken the tapes off-site, it was a shot in the dark. At that point, it’d take almost the rest of the day,” Nunnelee explains.

While they gratefully never had a full server failure, ALSDE’s IT team was spending more and more time dealing with unworkable backup scenarios and failures. They’d do daily incremental backups at night, with a full server backup on weekends – which took about four to seven tapes – then put this backup job off-site. These tapes would then be rotated every five to six weeks. But the tapes kept failing and the team couldn’t get a good backup more often than not.

“About once a week, we came in and found out that we didn’t get a good backup,” says Crews, “which is no small thing because we have apps like the child nutrition program running on SQL, which is huge for federal dollars – schools go online and order their meals, produce, and so forth.”

Not only that, but ALSDE’s Student Data System which coordinates information among the schools, that is replicated up to the state department, is a big deal, especially for migrant workers’ children. These kids might be in one part of the state for a four-month farm season, moving to another part for another season. ALSDE is able to keep a record if a student leaves or comes back in order to place them appropriately. Not having good backups of this material more often than not made Crews and Nunnelee concerned.

Solutions

The final catalyst came for the guys when they had to restore email with Backup Exec for one of the Assistant Superintendents, and they couldn’t get the data back. “We all looked at each other and said let’s move on,” recalls Crews. “I said to my team we’re all smart folks, let’s start researching a better backup and disaster recovery product and see what’s out there.”

The team did a deep dive into products that promised better backup and disaster recovery results. But because education is too often the poor agency on the block when it comes to spending money, Crews knew that his staff needed to be smart about a product they’d choose – a solution that was advanced, quick, easy to use, and not out of the ALSDE’s limited budget range.

In the end, only Dell AppAssure gave them the confidence that it was going to do what it actually said it would. “While I’m not from Missouri,” says Crews, “I love their motto – Show Me. That’s how I approached all the hype and promises of marketing. Does the darn thing work – really work? Dell AppAssure is a product that works.”

Results

The key features that Crews and Nunnelee rely on daily include Dell AppAssure’s intuitive administrative console and the ability to rapidly restore lost data.

Ease of use. “It’s as easy as using Windows Explorer,” says Nunnelee, who has spent a good portion of his career wrangling difficult administrative interfaces with other backup products. “You just right-click, copy, and restore the data. The cataloguing is just so much better as well, and it’s so much easier to maneuver around in than other products I’ve worked with.”

Rapid Restores. “The time to recover a file or email is under two minutes, and the panic or fear of the user is taken away,” says Crews. “We have different servers set at various intervals for our snaps, from 15 minutes to two hours, depending on what type of recovery point objective we’ve set for the server. And the speed of recovery every time with Dell AppAssure… well, let me just say, this is fast.”

Nunnelee agrees, noting how some of ALSDE’s longer-term employees who remember what file restores used to be like, are just in awe of Dell AppAssure because data recovery is no longer a three-day process. “I had a user call just the other day,” laughs Nunnelee. “She was a bit worried that the file she’d lost was gone and asked, ‘Do you think you can get it back?’ I teased her and said, ‘Well, I don’t really know…’ She started to get upset until I said, ‘Yep, it’s there.’ In other words, I restored her lost file while we were on the phone together. It was that quick and easy.”

ALSDE’s IT team can now turn its attention from worrying about backup and recovery, to focusing on creating a comprehensive disaster recovery process, using Dell AppAssure to replicate data offsite. “Dell AppAssure is not a product that you have to babysit; you don’t have to make sure it’s running. With Backup Exec, we had to check and make sure it was running after a weekend, or see if it ran out of tape, or reboot the server. Dell AppAssure has shown us that this is it – it does what it says it does.”

Crews and Nunnelee are eagerly telling others how Dell AppAssure has made the grade. At a recent Tech Ed conference, Crews made a beeline to Dell AppAssure’s information booth and exclaimed to the gathered crowd, “Listen to these guys. They’re not selling a bunch of junk. This stuff actually works!”

It’s an A+ for Dell AppAssure.

About Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE)

Headquartered in Montgomery, AL, ALSDE is Alabama’s state education agency with over 33 departments, 133 school systems with 1300+ schools, and over 500 employees.