Oregon School Districts Move to EMC for Remote Data Backup

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 11/11/08

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Clackamas Education Service District (ESD), a state-funded agency providing centralized educational programs and services, has introduced remote data backup services from EMC to 10 school districts in Clackamas County, OR.

"We provide schools and local agencies with services that may not be affordable on an individual basis, but become more feasible when the cost is shared," said Gary Scheel, network services coordinator for Clackamas ESD. "One application that benefits from this model is remote data backup. As schools accumulate more data and put additional functions online, there is growing need for a high-quality backup solution and backing up to tape or CD is no longer reliable or efficient enough."

Working with EMC Global Services to design and implement an EMC information infrastructure for its remote data backup service, Clackamas ESD chose EMC Avamar for backup and recovery. Avamar enables the schools to automatically identify and remove redundant data from the backup process before sending it over the network to Avamar Data Stores located at Clackamas ESD's datacenter. Clackamas ESD estimates incremental backups now take less than an hour, and frequent full backups are no longer required.

"EMC Avamar is a complete solution that had all the pieces we needed," said Scheel. "The school districts are on tight budgets so they can only afford networks with limited bandwidth. With built-in data de-duplication technology, the school now uses less network bandwidth, has sped up the backup process, and has reduced the amount of storage needed in the data center."

In addition to the remote backup service, Clackamas ESD uses EMC CLARiiON systems to store data for its Oracle-based electronic student information system as well as data for a Microsoft Windows file server and financial document imaging application.