East Cherry Creek Valley Water and Sanitation District

Situation

East Cherry Creek Valley Water and Sanitation District (ECCV) had been looking for a replacement for their legacy backup software solution, CA ARCserve, which had failed to keep up with current technology and was not meeting their PCI Compliance requirements. Their search had been going on for approximately 6 months and after speaking with their outside technical consultants, Digeteks, LLC., they determined that SEP sesam looked like a perfect fit. 

ENVIRONMENT

ECCV has over 14 physical servers and run over 19 Virtual Machines on VMware vSphere. They are running a mixed O/S environment using Windows, Linux, Novell and Novell GroupWise along with imaging software as well as other applications. ECCV has a mix of database applications for both business and engineering operations and needed a reliable DR network solution as well as a backup solution with a single console that provides easy access to all disk media. 

CHALLENGE

ECCV had been having a great deal of difficulty getting the old backup solution to work consistently. The CA ARCserve solution they were using required a significant amount of time to manage. A full backup of critical data took over 13 hours to complete and required continuous monitoring. Furthermore, there was a need to back up a mix of Windows, Linux, and Novell servers, the latter of which were no longer supported by ARCserve. A further issue was the need to meet PCI requirements and comply with all federal, state and local laws. In summary, ECCV required a faster, modern, more advanced, PCI compliant, backup solution.

SOLUTION

“The SEP sesam solution provides everything we were looking for and has been a real value both in time saved on manpower and backup speed,” stated Cory McMahon, IT Administrator for ECCV. “We now backup all of our file servers, databases and VM’s in a mixed Microsoft, Novell and Linux environment with less effort and considerably less time than we thought possible. Also, the PCI compliance provided without additional cost was a great and welcome value. We even added considerably more data and backups still only take 3 - 4 hours, where previous backups took at least 13 hours. I no longer have to babysit the backups until all hours. SEP sesam just works, and it has worked since we installed it,” confirmed McMahon. “The fact that it’s less expensive than our previous solution is an added bonus, and its speed continues to provide benefits as our data has begun to rapidly grow for our nightly backups. The added Disaster Recovery that SEP sesam provides for backing up and restoring VM’s allowed our disaster recovery project to become a reality sooner and with a lower budget requirement.” relayed McMahon.

RESULTS

“ECCV had to effectively backup data for the users and the company to ensure secure and continued data availability under almost any circumstances. For us, SEP sesam has truly filled that requirement. We have been able to easily adapt the software to fit in with our Starboard Storage solution, allowing us to get a backup in the primary location and actively restore the virtual machine to a DR site providing a true stand by hot site in case of any emergencies. The software solution immediately recognized the new hardware and allowed us to fully utilize the feature sets provided. It was a snap,” says McMahon.

“If I had to pick one thing that I truly like about SEP sesam, I would have to say, THE SPEED. We are able to provide enterprise class data backup and availability to our users. Not only did SEP sesam solve the pre-existing problems, but added additional functionality and options previously unavailable. In addition, time spent on backup administration and monitoring is now almost nonexistent and the backups complete in just 3 hours, 4 times faster than our previous solution,” states McMahon.