Autism Center Bolsters Data Backup with HYDRAstor
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In an effort to consolidate its business continuity/data recovery operations, the Anderson Center for Autism in Staatsburg, NY has deployed a storage backup and archive system from NEC called HYDRAstor HS8, replacing the school's "antiquated" mixed backup solution.
HYDRAstor is a grid storage platform introduced in September 2007 that takes a multi-tiered, multi-node approach to backup, including accelerator nodes (servers with multiple CPUs) and storage nodes (servers with both storage and processing power). Nodes can be added and removed on the fly without interruption in backups. (The school reported that it removed 25 percent of the nodes as a test and was able to complete a backup and restore successfully.)
The school said this node-based approach will help it meet current and future demands that are resulting from growth in services and facilities.
"It was critical that we find a backup and archive storage solution that not only addressed today's problems, but would be able to address the needs of our rapidly growing organization as well," said Gregg Paulk, director of Information Technologies for the non-profit Anderson Center for Autism, in a statement released this week. "We wanted a solution that was cost effective, highly reliable, fast and efficient. And, we wanted de-duplication. HYDRAstor met all of these needs."
The school reported that the system is costing about $0.70 per GB, that it takes one-tenth the time to back up data than the previous system (with the new system backing up twice as much data), and that the system was up and running in a little more than an hour.
The center serves 138 students and 57 adults and employs 540 staff. More information on HYDRAstor can be found here.
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About the author: David Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's online education technology publications, including THE Journal and Campus Technology. He can be reached at [email protected].
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