When a critical financial server at Brisbane’s Anglican Church Grammar School failed suddenly, its rapid and effortless recovery prompted Network Systems Administrator Gavin Rees to go out and buy 28 StorageCraft ShadowProtect licences next day.

The IT team had spent 22 hours attempting a manual restore and rebuild of the server, when Gavin suggested that they try to use ShadowProtect. Fortunately, a few days earlier they had installed a full working evaluation of StorageCraft ShadowProtect. When the complete server recovery took just a few minutes they were amazed. Even more impressive was the fact that that no data was lost. Had they restored back from tape, they would have lost a minimum of a whole day’s financial transactions, which would have had to be re-keyed, resulting in substantial disruption. This is the benefit of real-time recovery: fast recovery and no data loss.

“Until then we were using a tape backup solution, but that disk-based ShadowProtect result changed the picture entirely,” said Gavin. “It recovered the server quickly and easily. In hindsight, we would have gone straight to ShadowProtect and recovered within hours rather than overnight.

“To recover that server using the previous backup technology would have taken far longer, probably even days, with no certainty of retrieving all the data.  We were so impressed that I went out and bought 28 more server licences the very next day.”

The school, known popularly as Churchie, also uses ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange, which allows administrators to restore individual Exchange mailboxes, email messages and attachments, minimising downtime following a crisis. Although Churchie has never experienced a crisis situation, Gavin Rees has used the software to good effect in mounting and testing database backups and restores.

ShadowProtect also plays a key role in the school’s disaster recovery strategy. There are two data centres, one on either side of a road through the campus. ShadowProtect backs up information from the main data centre to the smaller secondary one.

Gavin Rees explained: “We did consider buying an expensive high availability (HA) product, but ShadowProtect supplies this capability at a fraction of the cost.  We have full confidence in its ability to restore quickly any crashed server or lost data. Using HA technology to recover from a disaster would have involved acquiring new servers and restoring them from tape - it would have taken days rather than hours and be a very costly exercise. Now we rely on ShadowProtect for local and remote backup, recovery and disaster recovery, for both our physical and virtual servers.”

The school also uses ShadowProtect IT Edition to recover PCs and laptops or back these up to new hardware when changing leases.  “We are so confident of losing no data that we simply do an incremental backup before we touch the server,” said Gavin. “We know we can roll back if we need to.”
Occasionally the school’s IT people have been called on to investigate the contents of students’ notebooks or tablets.  If there is a possible issue, they use IT Edition to take an image of the hard drive, and investigate the information on that for improper material.

“It’s a way of safeguarding a student situation when we believe something may be wrong,” said Gavin. “It’s so easy to mount an image and work through it to find anything that shouldn’t be there.”
He added: “On one occasion, a third party technician arrived at the school to update the main database. About three minutes into the job he exclaimed ‘oh crap, I’ve deleted the wrong file. When I was able to restore this almost immediately, it almost floored him!  It took longer for me to explain to him how we had restored the file than it did to actually restore it!”

The school’s IT infrastructure accommodates about 1,750 boys and 250 staff, with around 1,000 laptops and 650 tablets sharing a wireless network. The IT team run 30 servers in a virtual environment under VMWare, on VC4.1.  Some 30 data cabinets are connected via OM3 cabling in a fibre backbone.