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Cork City Council provides a diverse range of services to the 150,000 citizens of Cork, the second city in the Republic of Ireland. Like many local authorities, Cork City Council must operate within the limits of the resources it is allocated while delivering reliable, modern and sustainable services to safeguard the city’s future prosperity. To maintain quality of service, 900 of the council’s employees must access critical information at all times; however, increasing data volumes and virtualisation of its server environment were putting considerable limitations on capacity and data protection measures under pressure. The authority urgently needed to reduce the amount of capacity required for backups and was also looking to reduce recovery times to ensure the quality of public services.

The Challenge: Protection while Reducing Storage Capacity

The authority had been using a traditional tape backup method to protect its file storage and a small percentage of its virtual servers daily. Other virtual servers were cloned monthly with a copy saved to the council’s storage area network (SAN). Already requiring 2TB of storage, these clones were causing the SAN to be at capacity.

“We needed a way to protect our environment while freeing up space, and a comprehensive and scalable backup and recovery solution that would allow us to stop creating the clones and ensure timely recovery of data across our hybrid physical and virtual environment without an additional investment in storage capacity.” – Nora Smiddy, IS Operations, Cork City Council

Arcserve UDP: Protection for 55 Virtual and 5 Physical Servers

To safeguard the growing volume of data and virtual servers across the organisation, the council chose to complement its existing solution with Arcserve UDP, which is designed for incremental backups to disk.

Arcserve UDP protects Cork City Council’s data across 56 virtual VMware servers, including 10 Linux servers, and 5 physical Windows.10TB of data is protected, including SQL Server databases, Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and a JD Edwards financial system. Deduplication means 1.1TB of daily incremental changes requires only 142GB of storage.

Arcserve UDP also runs daily incremental backups on the council’s most critical servers: 13 virtual servers and 5 physical servers. Less critical servers that do not change regularly – such as servers hosting network-monitoring applications – are backed up weekly or monthly.

The Results: 3.5TB Freed Storage Capacity and Improved Operational Efficiency

With Arcserve UDP, Cork City Council can now:

Ensure continuous secure access to information: Arcserve UDP’s easy-to-use interface helps the authority recover data more quickly and easily while seeing the status of all backups at a glance within a single screen.
Optimise employee productivity: UDP has allowed better use of the council’s resources by allowing other work to be dispersed across the team. Time has been freed up, allowing the team to take on new tasks that will benefit the council and its users and safeguard the quality of service for its 900 users and citizens.
Reduce storage consumption and costs: The council has freed up 3.5TB of storage capacity as well as IT time. It now has the capacity to provision new virtual servers and systems that improve staff productivity and the delivery of public services.

“We now have the space to provision new virtual servers and workloads,” explains Smiddy. “We can replace older virtual servers and legacy versions of applications with new, more efficient systems. We have already installed a new CRM system, improving end user productivity.”