Canton Township Relies on Dell AppAssure Software for Application Backup and Recovery

Background

Canton Township is home to 85,000 people in southeastern Michigan. A large suburb of Detroit, Canton employs about 600 people in police, fire department and administrative positions. The majority of those employees rely on email for communication with one another, residents, elected officials and many other people who use and impact the services they provide. Joe Kocinski was using another backup solution to protect Canton’s vital Exchange environment but he still lacked a cost-effective way to restore lost email messages. He turned to Dell AppAssure (Exchange backup) to solve that problem and to protect the full Exchange environment along with SQL and application servers.

The voices in his head

The approximately 600 people that work in Canton Township’s police, fire department, and administrative positions rely on Microsoft Exchange for daily communications. “Email is a critical application,” says Joe Kocinski, Canton’s Network Administrator. “No one appreciates it until they don’t have it – except me and the voices in my head.” Joe relied on storage limits to keep his server “lean and ft” and used Microsoft Data Protection Manager to backup the data store. That just wasn’t enough.

“We needed to be able to restore lost messages and get Exchange backup online quickly if it ever went down,” explains Joe. “We couldn’t just rely on tape backup. If the server went down we’d have to retrieve the tape backup of the data and then rebuild the whole server.”

Joe set out to find an “effective way to restore a message” and located Dell AppAssure through a Google search. “With the application pack for Exchange, I can mount the Exchange data store, find a message, then restore it to a mailbox or PST file.” reports Joe. “It worked great.”

Success with Dell AppAssure

Joe realized Dell AppAssure could give him the full application protection he needed for Exchange, SQL servers, and application servers. He explains that “until I found Dell AppAssure, nothing was cost-effective.”

Now, Joe protects three SQL servers, one back-end Exchange server, and a few physical servers that run financial software and geographic information systems. “Implementation was flawless,” remembers Joe. “It could not have been simpler.”
Dell AppAssure takes snapshots of Canton’s servers at various intervals; every 15 minutes for Exchange storage, every 30 minutes for the Exchange system, every 30 minutes for one fle server, every 2 hours for another. “I’m using repurposed hardware with 800 GB of storage space and, so far, Dell AppAssure has only used 23% of that capacity. Considering everything I’m protecting, that’s quite a feat.”

Clicking along into the future

Joe says that Dell AppAssure is “clicking right along.” He hasn’t had to rely on Dell AppAssure tech support, though they were helpful in verifying that Dell AppAssure was indeed successfully backing up data. He has forwarded a feature idea to his sales rep. “Dell AppAssure offers the kind of openness I appreciate,” he says.Like many IT managers, Joe anticipates a virtual environment in the future. “I have used Dell AppAssure to restore data to a virtual test environment and it worked perfectly,” he says. “All the latest data was there.”

Joe does have the same cost restraints as other public and private organizations so his virtualization plans hinge on finding solutions that ft his tight budget. He has been comparing costs and feels that “Dell AppAssure is more cost-effective that other solutions and that’s important.”

About Canton Township

Canton is located in the heart of southeastern Michigan. Situated conveniently between Detroit and Ann Arbor, Canton is a community that has it all.

It is just minutes from Metro Airport, and within the 36 square miles that make up Canton, you will find a responsive local government, a wide variety of housing options, restaurants for every taste, outstanding shopping opportunities, acres of parks, and a world-class library.