CA`s BrightStor Enterprise Backup gets straight A`s in storage management from Halton District School Board

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that Canada`s Halton District School Board (HDSB) has selected BrightStor Enterprise Backup to manage and automate its critical data protection operations. By doing so, the board has both ensured its ability to meet the needs of the community it serves and reduced its cost of IT operations.

HDSB, a regional school board, serves approximately 45 000 public school students in four municipalities in Southern Ontario. With 4 000 teachers, administrators and support personnel, it is one of the region`s largest employers.

Previously, HDSB used a manual backup methodology to safeguard data in 85 sites including 16 high schools and 69 elementary schools. Technicians had to travel to the high schools to replace tapes in the local tape units. At the elementary schools, they relied on disk mirroring and often ran into disk drive space issues. Both methods were time-consuming and unreliable.

BrightStor Enterprise Backup removes the need for local intervention and significantly reduces the backup window across HDSB`s storage area network (SAN). With backups scheduled from a central server, and carried out at night while the network is minimally utilised, HDSB will improve the efficiency and reliability with which its IT staff executes storage and backup tasks for its almost 1TB of data.

HDSB selected BrightStor Enterprise Backup because of its long-term strategic relationship with CA and the technical superiority of the CA solution. "Every day, thousands of teachers, students and administrators use our systems to create teaching tools, complete assignments and document student progress. Protecting this data is vital to educational institutions operating in the Information Age," said Keith Johnson, HDSB`s Superintendent of Education and Information Technology. "The outstanding performance, scalability and ease of operation allow us to effectively fulfil this core technology requirement without over-burdening our IT staff - which makes it an indispensable component of our overall technology management strategy."

BrightStor Enterprise Backup will enable HDSB to support its three core objectives:

* Increasing storage capacity of 50 key servers using SAN technology;

* Extending the SAN deployment to support student storage needs as well as the board`s critical data; and

* Minimising the strain on the board`s WAN to ensure its ability to support other bandwidth-intensive applications, such as distance learning and multimedia.

BrightStor Enterprise Backup also integrates easily with the Unicenter IT Resource Management suite of solutions that HDSB uses for desktop and server management.

"Educational institutions that want to make the most effective use of technology to optimise the learning experience are quickly discovering that storage can become a serious management issue," stated Joanne Moretti, General Manager, CA Canada. "The Halton District School Board has demonstrated that CA BrightStor Enterprise Backup is an ideal way to address this issue, and serves as a prototype for other school boards in Canada and around the world."