Ohio transit authority turns to all-in-one data protection
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SORTA hopes to reduce the cost and complexity of managing backup and disaster recovery operations with all-in-one backup appliances.
Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA) has selected all-in-one backup appliances to protect data in both physical and virtual environments.
As a result, officials hope to reduce the cost and complexity of managing backup and disaster recovery operations.
SORTA is a public transportation agency serving Cincinnati and its suburbs, providing more than 17 million rides per year as part of its fixed-route bus and Access para-transit services.
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The agency has a data center in downtown Cincinnati and three satellite data centers connected by 100 megabits/sec links. SORTA officials wanted to replicate sets of backup data between data centers onto disk for safekeeping. Meanwhile, they wanted limit tape for the archiving of data in the main data center.
To protect data at all of its sites, SORTA officials selected two network backup appliances from Arkeia Software: the R220 backup appliance and the R220-LTO backup appliance.
Two sites are backed up over a wide-area network to Arkeia’s R220 backup appliance. Backup data to each appliance is replicated to the other. While data is replicated to off-site storage, an integrated LTO4 drive in the second appliance lets tapes be written for archiving data.
SORTA officials evaluated products from Avamar, Backup Exec and Data Domain, but they were complex and expensive, said Michael Carey, systems administrator at SORTA.
The Arkeia solution has provided space savings of up to 97 percent with its Progressive Deduplication feature that lets SORTA reduce bandwidth needed to replicate backup sets over the wide-area network, Carey said.
Arkeia network backup appliances also have a plug-and-play configuration capability that made the set up easy and day-to-day management simple, he said.
Arkeia hardware appliances provide all-in-one data protection for single- or multisite organizations, Arkeia officials said. Six models of appliances are available as rack-mount or desktop models. The Arkeia appliances integrate with the company’s Network Backup suite with matched hardware, including redundant disk and an optional integrated tape drive, Arkeia officials said.