Wolverhampton improves data storage with BakBone

Primary Care Trust centralises data protection strategy

Wolverhampton City Primary Care Trust (PCT) has deployed an improved data protection system, centralising its infrastructure management to offer a better disk-to-disk-to-tape strategy.

The PCT has two sites employing 2,000 people, and 2,000 computers connected to over 75 servers, providing community and mental health services for the population of Wolverhampton.

Wolverhampton City PCT IT manager Tracy Kenny said that a lack of existing capacity, and significant issues with its current backup hardware, necessitated the quick deployment of a new system.

"After looking carefully at all the selection factors we decided we would not compromise on reliability, technical support and ease of use," she said.

"Scalability and general future-proofing were critical, so we chose BakBone Netvault: BackUp."

Wolverhampton City PCT's data storage infrastructure now features a disk-to-disk-to-tape set-up split across the two sites, with the primary site load balancing file and print, Exchange, SQL and other core services across fibre channel and iSCSI SANs.

The secondary site has two iSCSI arrays and an LTO 3 tape library for data storage serving both sites.

BakBone NetVault: Backup allows the IT department to manage its entire infrastructure, protecting around 3.5TB of data from a single point, the organisation said.

A single backup server was used with an attached storage array and tape loader. A second smart client server at the second site is attached to another array, and NetVault: Backup is deployed on all the servers, backing up data to their local array via the respective server.