Unitrends Keeps Non-Profit Employees Working in the Field with Clients

The Challenges

In an effort to better assist a client population spread across Long Island and outlying areas, Maryhaven provides services in three main facilities and more than 30 remote sites. A distributed workforce requires a distributed IT infrastructure in an effort to ensure Maryhaven employees have reliable access to business applications and client information. Protecting that data became a top IT priority as existing remote tape backup solutions simply could not provide the reliability or efficiency the organization required.

The Solution

Maryhaven worked with its IT service provider to not only re-engineer its backup solution, but to replace tape with a remote disk-to-disk solution from Unitrends. The Unitrends solution allows Maryhaven’s IT staff to conduct more reliable backups to disk, improving data protection while shortening the backup window and reducing complexity. The backups are managed by a dedicated IT administrator from a central management console at headquarters, making the process more efficient and reliable.

“Migrating from tape to disk was the best thing I ever did,” Velez said. “I can now back up my entire IT environment from a central management console and be assured that it was successful and that the data can be easily recovered.”

In order for Maryhaven administrators and employees to have access to the business applications that run the organization—a client database, class and workshop schedules, email, time card applications, payroll etc.—the IT staff has to ensure reliable remote access. Managing a disparate IT infrastructure for a distributed workforce on a non-profit’s budget can be a daunting task. Protecting agency information has always been a priority for Maryhaven. Prior to its work with Unitrends, however, it relied on tape backup and a recovery system that was unreliable.

Efficient, Reliable Disk Backups 

Maryhaven contacted Flexible Business Systems, an IT service provider in Hauppauge, N.Y., to explore replacing its inconvenient and unreliable tape backup system with a disk-based solution. After seeing an impressive demonstration of a Unitrends Data Protection Unit (DPU), Mr. Velez decided to deploy the solution, giving him a robust and inexpensive remote disaster recovery system. The Unitrends disk-to-disk backup solution is deployed in Maryhaven’s data center and automatically backs up the non-profit’s Windows servers and distributed Novell environment.

“After researching disk solutions we knew that Unitrends would be the best disaster recovery system for Maryhaven’s IT environment,” said Marty Schmidtt, co-owner, Flexible Systems. “It is specifically designed for distributed IT environments with the goal of simplifying remote backups.”

Using Unitrends’ management GUI, Mr. Velez has set up an alerting system that sends him an email every night after the backup cycle has been completed, giving him peace of mind that the organization’s data is protected. The reports tell him how much data was backed up and how long the cycle took and informs him of any problems that may have occurred.

Improved Data Availability for Remote Employees

With the new disaster recovery solution from Unitrends ensuring that data is backed up properly, Mr. Velez is now able to restore any data quickly and easily—regardless of whether the data is stored in the data center or out on the edge of the network.

“Before the Unitrends solution, I would have been nervous and not confident that our information could be recovered. Now, I wouldn’t be worried if we had a drive failure tomorrow. I’d be able to restore the entire system in an hour or two, no problem.” -- Patrick Velez, director of MIS, Maryhaven

Recently, Mr. Velez had to recover 3Gbs of data that had been inadvertently deleted by an end user. He logged on to the Unitrends recovery console and quickly identified the last backup version of the data. Mr. Velez then started the data recovery process and stepped away from the console momentarily. He came back five minutes later to check the status and noticed that the system was idle. Panic ran through his mind as he assumed the data was corrupted and unrecoverable. It was then that he realized that the Unitrends solution was idle because it had already finished the recovery process in the five minutes Velez was away from his desk.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I had to check it several times to make sure the data really had been retrieved. Unitrends actually found and recovered the 3Gb of data faster than it would have taken to save it to a DVD.”

The Unitrends solution also provides BareMetal restore capabilities, allowing Mr. Velez to completely restore a server or workstation from the ground up including data, applications and user settings. Employee laptops that have been dropped on the ground, absorbed coffee spills or experienced hard drive failures can be completely restored in several hours, bringing their owners back into the workday faster.

In the future, Mr. Velez would like to enhance Maryhaven’s disaster recovery capabilities even further by taking advantage of Unitrends’ off-site vaulting capabilities. Working in conjunction with the DPU, a Unitrends data protection vault (DPV) would automatically replicate backed up data in the data center to a remote disaster recovery facility, strategically placed miles away. That way, the organization would be able to continue operations in the event of damage to the data center, a regional disaster or other cause of widespread data loss.

The Unitrends DPU 2000 does a weekly full backup and daily incremental backups of 10 Windows servers in the main data center that runs the organization’s management applications (finance, scheduling, payroll) and its SQL client database as well as file, print and Web functionality. The solution also backs up two Novell servers in the data center, a Novell server in each of the two remote facilities and a CITRIX server that supports dozens of VPN connections. Selected employee workstations are backed up nightly, creating a daily snapshot of the hard drive. Regular backups ensure that data can be recovered quickly and easily from anywhere on the network in case of drive failures or a natural disaster.

Key Benefits