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posted on 02 June 2008 08:52

The Royal Schools for the Deaf and Communication Disorders is registered under the Seashell charity and provides full time education (school and college) and residential care to students 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.

Its students all have complex communication difficulties and often require one-to-one, sometimes two-to-one support for care and to access learning.

The school/college has around 400 staff working in shifts to provide services to its 83 students. All students have a severe, profound or multiple learning difficulty and additional complex communication needs. Many students have autism, multi-sensory and/or physical impairment, and rely heavily on the IT infrastructure at the school to work reliably and consistently so that their education and care are continued daily.

The school’s IT systems are required to run specialist education software and store the myriad of Microsoft Office files produced in the students’ education and care plan and in the administration of the organisation as a whole. As well as this the school also stores large amounts of video files recorded every day to aid the students’ learning and evidence progress. They are also used for the purpose of individual medical case reviews and educational assessments.

The school IT infrastructure has grown over time from a few desktop PCs to an IT estate of around 150 PCs and laptops spread throughout the buildings on their large site in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire. Behind the scenes seven Dell servers run the entire school’s applications and store the working data.

As the school’s IT systems grew in importance the IT and Resources Manager, Mike Pearn realised the need to regularly backup the data for safety.

“The use of IT systems provides immeasurable benefits to our students. However we do find that it is quite a common occurrence for important files to be mistakenly overwritten or deleted by students and staff alike.”

The Royal School generally found that files were being accidentally overwritten around 10-15 times a year. Bearing in mind the specialist nature of the education and care performed at the school, such data loss would prove particularly damaging to the students if files could not be restored efficiently.

“Eight years ago I bought an HP tape drive with a Yosemite Technologies Tapeware product. I would go to the PCs and laptops, individually backing them up to ensure that our students’ work would not be lost in the event a hard drive failed or an important file was overwritten.

“As our IT estate expanded and we networked the desktops to servers we knew that we had put all our eggs in one basket and would have to consistently backup the servers where all user data was now centrally held.”

Mike continues, “We examined the choices of backup providers around at the time and decided to stay with Yosemite. Our IT support partner SoftAssure managed this process. From a fiscal perspective the fee for the great job the software does is very reasonable. From an operational point of view since we had the software installed the roll out was already done.

“We signed a contract with Yosemite when we expanded our backup onto the new servers. Whenever we installed a new server SoftAssure managed the license acquisition which came back from Yosemite the same day. We recently decided to upgrade to Yosemite’s new Unlimited Server license as their software had made the previous process so easy to manage. Now we have one license that protects an unlimited number of networked servers so when we add a new server there is no incremental cost for protection. The beauty of the system is that is backs up incrementally overnight very quickly when the network is being used least. It takes a full backup each weekend so we keep all versions of files safe in case we need to revert back to an earlier iteration of a document.”

Yosemite provides an easy to manage system that enables the IT manager to set up a template to control which machines should be backed up and what the timing schedule should be.

“The Yosemite solution, Yosemite Backup 8.5 (Unlimited Windows Server edition) compares very favourably to the other vendors that we have used in the past for backup. The solution is so easy to use and reliable that we have total piece of mind. We don’t worry about it - even if the power goes down it starts itself up again and we remain protected at all times.”

About Yosemite Technologies

Yosemite Technologies is a global provider of data protection software solutions that span from the desktop to the data center. Yosemite develops solutions that protect environments running Microsoft® Windows, Linux, and NetWare®. Yosemite's flagship product, Yosemite Backup™, represents the next generation of backup software with Self Tuning Logic™ for fast backup and restore operations and an integrated Virtual Library option, D2D2Ne™, that provides multi-level, heterogeneous 'disk to disk to any' backup.

The FileKeeper family of products protect laptops and desktops with always on data protection ranging from Small or Home Offices all the way to the Enterprise. Yosemite has developed strong technology and channel partnerships with leading companies including HP, Dell, Microsoft, Quantum, Gateway and Exabyte. The company's commitment to Backup Simplified™ represents Yosemite's focus on delivering products that offer unmatched performance, ease-of-use and value.

[Formatted by Majid Soltani.]