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State of Indiana Office of Technology

Posted by Dave Raffo on October 12, 2006

Tags: Backup & Recovery,  Infrastructure

Channel: Backup & Recovery, Data Center

As part of a mandate to centralize and consolidate IT infrastructure, the state of Indiana is using Symantec NetBackup PureDisk to overhaul its backup management and provide disaster recovery for more than 300 remote sites.

"The past 18 months we've been working on consolidation of our infrastructure by mandate of the governor," says Jim Rose, systems administration manager for the State of Indiana Office of Technology. "By infrastructure, we mean base-level service such as email, file services, authentication, and Active Directories. One aspect of that was support of our PCs and servers in remote offices."

Rose targeted remote offices with servers in them -- more than 300 of the roughly 1,000 offices providing state services in Indiana -- as ideal targets for centralized backups and saving money. More than 200 of those offices were running Windows with a single Active Directory with Symantec Backup Exec and backing up to local tape drives.

You can guess the problems: Non-IT personnel supervised backups, and critical data was stored only at the remote office.

"There were a couple of instances we had complete data loss within a specific facility," Rose says. "A few times an office burned down, and so did all the tapes and the server with it. Other times, we couldn't do restores because the person hadn't rotated the tape properly or didn't manage a backup properly, and one of the tape drives failed."