One University's Criteria for Selecting a Disk-based Backup Solution

As NAS providers like Iomega add more software features to their NAS appliances, they are attracting the interest of an entirely new set of organizations. One such organization, Midland Lutheran College (MLC) in Fremont, NE, was so impressed by the features on the new Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d over competing products that it went ahead and purchased the product for use in its academic environment. Since I personally knew MLC's Director of Information Technology, Ken Clipperton, I asked and received his permission to stop by and visit MLC in order to gain some deeper insight into how he came to select the ix4-200d and what his plans for it were at MLC.

Unlike many other case studies that I do where the storage provider introduces me to the end user that is using their product so I can do a write-up on it, this is a circumstance where, during casual conversation, I found out that MLC was using the StorCenter ix4-200d. As it so happens, Ken's son and my son play on a flag football team and, during one of their games, we got to talking about what we each do for a living. During our conversation, Ken shared that he had just purchased an ix4-200d and was willing to show me around MLC's IT department and explain how MLC planned to use it.

We connected in late November 2009 and our initial topic of conversation centered on what problems he was trying to solve irrespective of what NAS solution he selected. There were four (4) issues that Ken wanted his NAS implementation to solve:

1. Ineffective client backup practices. MLC has about 200 employees but no effective desktop and laptop backup strategy for university employees. The IT department does provide a home directory to which employees can store backups of their files and many departments use network shares for critical files, but Ken has found that most employees either don't backup their local files or do so infrequently. The college has experienced several data loss incidents in the year that Ken has been at MLC. These losses would all have been avoided if an effective client backup strategy was in place. A barrier to implementing a client backup strategy was a lack of available storage in the server environment.
2. No offsite replication of backup data. Ken wanted an automated tool to do replication between different sites of the backup data. Being part of Network Nebraska, he has access to low cost, high bandwidth connections and two off-site data centers where he can place MLC's IT equipment for off-site replication. He envisions using a NAS solution first as a backup target and then he wants to take advantage of the NAS replication abilities to replicate backup data to one of these sites for a base line form of DR.
3. Lack of an effective Active Directory integration in prior SMB NAS solution. Ken had previously purchased the Buffalo TeraStation III that was supposed to have Microsoft Active Directory (AD) integration but once he had implemented the device, he found that the AD integration was oversold in the product literature. For Ken, AD integration meant that new users would automatically be granted private NAS storage with per-user disk quotas enabled. After he had it installed, he discovered that granting NAS access and enabling quotas would be an extra step and that everyone could see everything on the volume. He concluded that the TeraStation III was still just a workgroup product that was not ready to address MLC's requirements.
4. Traditional disk-to-tape (D2T) server backups. MLC is still using a traditional tape-based approach to server backups for the 2TB of data that it needs to protect on these servers. Ken saw an opportunity to leverage the NAS purchase to jump from D2T all the way to D2D2D by taking advantage of both NAS replication and NAS support for backing up to USB-attached hard drives.

So with these four criteria in mind, Ken began his search for a product that better matched MLC's requirements. What he ended up selecting was the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d. In an upcoming blog entry, I will examine which of the ix4-200d's features factored predominantly in his decision to select this product.