CASE STUDY

City of Livingston, CA

Having been let down by the old tape based backup system once too many times, QuickPCSupport, a computer consulting firm working for the City of Livingston, CA, searched the internet for an alternative solution. The goal was to find a logical system that would provide a fireproof and weather proof disk to disk backup solution for network servers and desktops.

At last, they found the ioSafe disaster proof disk backup, a solution that meets and exceeds all City needs. “With ioSafe, we no longer worry about cumbersome backup jobs and tape rotations,” said Mario Campos, President of QuickPCSupport. “Nor do we worry about training staff on how to rotate those tapes and perform tape drive cleaning every 30 days. So by using ioSafe, we eliminate the risk of human errors and save at least $20,000 per year for the City of Livingston.”

Using ioSafe hardware with Symantec software, the City is now able to perform incremental backups of the network throughout the day – even backing up mailboxes from the Exchange Server while it is being used. Before, they could only do one backup job a day, because it would take approximately 6 hours to finish. With ioSafe, a full system backup is done in just 1.5 hours – four times faster. Furthermore, the City achieves incremental backups of the entire system, including the accounting databases, in less than 15 minutes!

The City has combined the ioSafe solution with a Linksys network storage adapter, which allows them to make ioSafe available on the network as a stand alone disk backup. This configuration allows for easy restoration of the system, from any workstation attached to the network, even when the servers are being repaired.

The City of Livingston is in central California and has a population of 10,473 residents. Although it's a small city, Livingston has taken big steps to protect its digital assets.

The results show high return on investment:

• Savings of at least $20,000 per year in hardware, maintenance, and staffing costs
  
• Less than 15 minutes to complete incremental backups – compared to none before
• Substantially better recovery point objective and faster data restores
• Built in protection against fire, water, theft, building collapse and primary server failure
• Only 90 minutes to complete a full backup – a 400% improvement

“Besides their product, dealing with the ioSafe staff has also been a great experience,” commented Campos. “They have been very responsive and insightful in helping the City of Livingston strengthen its
business continuity plan.

“We would recommend ioSafe to any computer environment that requires realtime and consistent backups of the network, and is under a crucial time constraint,” concluded Campos.

Data backup strategies are like insurance policies, do you have enough coverage?

External USB Fire Resistant Hard Drive

ioSafe R4 NAS Appliance				External Hard Drive Fire Safe
	Fire Safe to 1700°F Waterproof to 30 ft. 3 or 5 yr. Warranty $5K per disk data recovery service
Network Attached Storage				External Hard Disk Drive