Teach For America Deploys Integrated EMC Backup and Recovery Solution to Accelerate Its Mission
Backup Times Reduced by 3x, Recovery Requests Completed in Minutes Versus a Full Day, Highly Automated Backup and DR for Virtual, Remote Office and Critical Database Data Stores Achieved
HOPKINTON, Mass., Oct. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that Teach For America, a non-profit organization that works in partnership with communities to expand educational opportunity for children facing the challenges of poverty, deployed an integrated EMC® backup and recovery solution to protect its expanding and evolving IT environment. By leveraging EMC Avamar®, EMC Data Domain® and EMC NetWorker® solutions, Teach For America has accelerated its backup and recovery processes, extended data retention times, consolidated its remote office data, reduced its dependence on tape and established a disaster recovery capability. In addition, with EMC Avamar protecting its VMware® environment, the company has established an exceptional foundation for the continuation of its virtualization efforts. Teach For America is also moving forward with a complete storage technology refresh, upgrading its existing systems to EMC VNX® unified storage.
Teach For America is a data driven organization that uses metrics to continuously measure and improve its criteria for the recruitment and development of successful teachers. At any given time, its 1,900 full time staffers are supporting over 10,000 teachers impacting nearly 750,000 students across the United States. With its highly automated EMC backup and recovery solution, Teach For America's IT staff can focus on helping to drive the organization's rapid expansion and accelerate its mission to bring high quality education to students in urban and rural public schools.
Customer Benefits:
- Faster Backups and Recoveries- With EMC backup and recovery products, full backups on weekends no longer extend into the following business week, and file recoveries take only a few minutes, versus the full business day their previous system required.
- Extended Retention for Better Recovery Operations-EMC market-leading deduplication technologies have enabled Teach For America to extend its online data retention period to enable efficient servicing of recovery requests.
- Consolidated Remote Office Data- With EMC Avamar, Teach For America has been able to arrest growing costs associated with their remote office backups, and consolidate remote office backup data to their data center.
- Operational Efficiency- With its highly automated EMC backup and recovery solution, Teach For America has saved significant staff time and can focus on more strategic projects.
- Effective Disaster Recovery- Teach For America's Avamar and Data Domain systems automatically replicate critical backups to a secondary data center, ensuring safety and recoverability of Teach For America's data in the event of disaster.
Customer Challenges and Solution:
The Teach For America IT organization supports more than 1,900 users across 46 offices—up from 850 users and 26 sites five years ago. Accompanying its organizational expansion, Teach For America's annual data growth rate was over 50 percent, and its previous tape-based backup infrastructure was increasingly not able to keep pace. Full backups intended to complete on weekends were now requiring three days, often running into business hours on Monday. In addition, protecting data from its remote offices had become more challenging, as data at each remote office grew in size and the number of remote offices increased. Teach for America needed a new, more scalable and cost-efficient backup solution for both its data center and remote offices.
To address the organization's rapid growth, Teach For America partnered with EMC to create an integrated backup and recovery solution that leveraged a range of EMC products, ensuring that backup windows and RTOs were met, automation would reduce staff time expended for backup and disaster recovery, and that the solution could scale to meet future demands of the organization.
- EMC NetWorker unified backup and recovery software and Data Domain deduplication storage systems were integrated via DD Boost software to ensure rapid backup and recovery performance for critical databases and applications while reducing storage capacity requirements and network bandwidth usage.
- EMC Avamar was deployed for both consolidation of remote office backups and to protect Teach For America's VMware environment.
- Automated replication of both Data Domain and Avamar-based backups to remote systems at a secondary site ensured a strong disaster recovery capability.
Customer Quotes:
Thomas Licciardello, Vice President, Technology Operations, Teach For America
"We chose an integrated hybrid solution from EMC to leverage the various technologies that could keep pace with our growth. EMC has a broad, well integrated portfolio of backup and recovery solutions that we're confident will enable our organization to expand so we can reach more children for years to come."
"Restoring from Data Domain takes a few minutes instead of a full business day with tape. The efficiency and integrity of Data Domain has been like night and day compared to our old system."
"By using Avamar to backup our regional offices, we backup and consolidate remote data rapidly and cost efficiently. We expect payback on the solution in just six to eight months."
Additional Resources:
- Learn more about EMC Avamar, EMC Data Domain and EMC Networker
- Learn more about EMC VNX unified storage systems
- Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN
About EMC
EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.
EMC, Avamar, Data Domain, NetWorker and VNX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks herein are the property of their respective holders.
VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship with VMware or any other company.
SOURCE EMC Corporation
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