Orange County Slashes Backup Times

Orange County, Fla., revealed today that it is using storage array technology to slash backup times for its critical security data. The Electronic Access Department of the Countys facilities management division keeps safe and lock combinations as well as other security information for all 6,000 county employees.

The new ESA1500 array from Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT), which has been in use for two months, can now back this information up in a matter of seconds, compared to between eight and 10 hours when CD-Roms were used.

Orange County’s employees need access to a wide range of government buildings. These include the county courthouse and jail, the sheriff’s office, and parks and recreation facilities.

The County had already tried out a variety of methods to back up the data, which was held on five Microsoft SQL and Access databases. As well as CD-Roms, this included using tape drives and backup software. However, the end results were failed backups, lost data, and constant maintenance problems.

Ron Gawlik, East District Maintenance Supervisor of the facilities management division, says, “We had one incident with a CD-Rom that was scratched and we had to bring extra people in to redo the database.”Previously, Orange County officials were also faced with the unenviable prospect of saving the database information manually every time the key locks were changed or a member of staff left.

This, however, is now a thing of the past, and Gawlik is certain that the new technology is saving taxpayers’ dollars, although he was unable to provide a specific figure. “It has saved money on overtime, and we don’t have to buy CD-Roms anymore.”

Ease of use is another key benefit, with the county now using six databases. “This is one of the easiest systems to use outside of a Web-based system, which we would not use because of security," says Gawlik.

The ESA1500 was unveiled this week by Adaptec and offers one terabyte of storage, although this can be expanded. In a statement, the company described the technology as an application-specific storage array that automatically backs up corporate PC and laptop information that is unprotected by standard server backups.

James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum0