Grandville Public Schools

Public School System, 14 Locations

Customer Challenge:
To protect its student accounting data and financial data from disaster

“LiveVault protects our data on a continuous basis, and eliminates
the inefficiencies of tape-based backup, such as manual rotation
and the possibility that a tape has been corrupted."
Barbara Hiemstra, Technology Supervisor, Grandville Public Schools

It was a hard lesson for school administrators in Grandville, Michigan to learn. One of the high school’s hard drives crashed last year, wiping out the student accounting information including attendance records for 1,900 students. This data also determines how the school system receives funding from the state.

When the hard drive crashed, Grandville tried to restore the data from a backup tape. Grandville thought that the tape backup safeguarded it from this type of disaster, but the tape didn’t restore properly and technicians had to work over the weekend to re-input more than three weeks worth of student data to comply with state regulations.

“That disaster really took its toll on us,” said Barbara Hiemstra, Technology Supervisor of Grandville Public Schools. “We had to pay nearly ten thousand dollars in overtime to our workers and consultants to re-create the data and some employees no longer had confidence in us and the way we protected our records.”

Learning From Its Mistakes
Following the hard drive crash, Grandville Public Schools examined its data protection strategy. The school district wanted a backup and recovery method that was more reliable than tape, and would continuously capture the ever-changing information in both its student accounting database and its financial database. Grandville ultimately selected the LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service, purchased through LiveVault partner Impact Systems Group.

“We selected LiveVault because it addresses and corrects all of the problems that we encountered with tape-based backup,” said Hiemstra. “LiveVault protects our data on a continuous basis, and eliminates the inefficiencies of tape-based backup, such as manual rotation and the possibility that a tape has been corrupted. We can now be confident that our data is always fully backed up and recoverable at the click of a button.”

LiveVault at Work for Grandville
LiveVault backs up business server data via a secure Internet connection and stores it in an offsite facility, where it is available for immediate recovery in the event of a system failure, virus, human error or other disaster.

When Grandville signed up for the service, LiveVault first performed an initial full backup of each of the school system’s servers. After the initial backup, LiveVault operates in the background on a constant basis, continuously capturing changes at the byte level as they are created, even in open files. These changes are securely transmitted over the Internet, using the LiveVault Virtual Backup & Recovery Network (VBN), which enables secure point-to-point communications, so that a customer’s data will maintain its integrity throughout the backup process. Because the changes are being made at such a small level, most LiveVault customers, including Grandville, don’t need to upgrade their bandwidth when they sign up for the service. The only requirement is that customers have an “always on” broadband connection.

Security in Off-Site Storage
LiveVault provides even more peace of mind to Grandville by storing its customers' data in a secure, disaster-proof location.

The LiveVault service works by continuously sending changes as they occur from Grandville’s servers to disk-based vaults in an offsite data center. These changes are stored on disk and archived to tape daily. The LiveVault servers keep a copy of data for 30 days on tape, and customers can initiate restore requests from any of these data sets.

LiveVault has engineered the service so that even if Grandville were to unplug its connection to LiveVault, and plug it back in later, the backup job would pick up where it left off. With other forms of backup, users would have to restart the whole operation if their connection were to be interrupted.

In addition to using the LiveVault service, Grandville Public Schools still keeps a historical copy of its data on tape. But Hiemstra says tape has its place, and it’s not as the main data protection strategy for Grandville’s critical student and financial data.

“We use tape for our older files that we want to keep on record,” said Hiemstra. “Tape works well for archiving, but it’s too unreliable to use on a daily basis to keep our school system up and running.”

Easy Restores using MyLiveVault
Grandville administrators are now able to restore their data seamlessly using MyLiveVault Web Management Portal. MyLiveVault allows the school system to set its backup policies and monitor the process 24x7x365 from any Web location. When Grandville needs to restore data, it can view an inventory of all its data files, current and historic, and initiate the restore at the click of a button. If something were to happen to Grandville’s data on the weekend when administrators are out of the office, the data can easily be restored through MyLiveVault via a remote machine, so that everything is up and running for school Monday.

Previously, administrators had to physically retrieve and load the tapes, then wait several hours for a tape to perform the restore, thereby taking an application offline for most of the day. If this were to happen over the weekend, the school would have to pay overtime to a technician, and there was always the possibility that, like before, the tape would not restore correctly, and the cost to the school would increase in terms of manpower to recreate the lost data. LiveVault now guarantees the restore of Grandville’s data, does it in just minutes and lets administrators get back to work quickly, increasing productivity with far less effort.

“LiveVault is so easy to use. It takes the burden of backup and recovery off our hands,” said Hiemstra. “No matter what happens to our servers, we know we’re prepared. I can’t imagine protecting our data any other way.”