Enterprise-Class Backup and Continuity on an Education Budget

The Challenge

“We support 1,800 clients with a staff of three. You name [a challenge], we face it — time, staffing, budget, etc.,” says Patrick Bernotas, technology director at Taylor Community Schools. “Before Unitrends, we used a Dell LTO tape autoloader. What a pain! We had to manually rotate tapes and it took about 2 days to recover just one server image. We very much needed peace of mind on backup and data recovery for our critical student and server data.” So, in 2013, Bernotas began a search to replace their tape backup solution.

“We very much needed peace of mind on backup and data recovery for our critical student and server data.”

After much deliberation, Taylor Community Schools chose a Unitrends Recovery Series physical appliance — a slim 1U model that can protect 10TB of data. “I think the appliance fits our business model and our operating cost as we are a K-12 education environment. The need for disaster recovery and backup are a priority and is needed for day-to-day operations. Though most schools cannot afford an enterprise solution, this is where Unitrends fits very well,” said Bernotas. “We use the Unitrends appliance for disaster recovery of our virtual machine infrastructure. It is an inexpensive, easy-to-use platform that is truly set-it-and-forget-it. It was easy to set up, simple to use, and has a low total cost of ownership.”