Storage | News

Palm Beach County School District Saves $700,000 with Storage Platform

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 10/03/13

The School District of Palm Beach County has deployed a new system for storing copy data and reduced costs by $700,000 over five years. In addition to the savings, the district has "reduced its total storage footprint, slowed its data growth, and enhanced its overall backup and recovery capabilities," according to a news release.

Serving 180,000 students and 23,000 employees, the district includes 187 remote sites and manages a petabyte of storage, 60 percent of which is copy data such as backup, analytics, or disaster recovery information.

"A petabyte of storage represents between $250,000 to a million dollars — for a school district with limited resources, the expense of maintaining a data set of this size and the time consuming process of backing it up was a drain of valuable resources that could be better allocated," said Henry Martin, infrastructure manager at Palm Beach County School District, in a prepared statement.

"Managing it all required three separate applications for backup management, data check-in, and data restore, adding to the complexity and growing price tag of the district's IT infrastructure," according to a news release, and slowing the district's ability to deliver new services and applications.

The district also had to shut down its primary production facility for three to four hours each week so that a trained IT staff member could perform backup and maintenance processes.

The district decided to deploy Actifio's Copy Data Storage platform, which "is optimized for managing copies of data, eliminating redundant silos of infrastructure and data management applications," according to information released by the company.

Now the district can perform its backup and maintenance processes in minutes through an interface useable by any member of the department.

"IT leadership should feel comfortable investing in Actifio for a long term partnership," Martin said. "Managing copy data — one of the biggest pains that IT data centers have, is revolutionary. We are no longer adding storage as a 'band aid' solution and ignoring the underlying problem. Actifio came in and solved this issue at a critical time when department funds have been cut."

More information about Actifio's Copy Data Storage platform is available at actifio.com.