The Tampa Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau is an independent, non-profit organization representing over 700 businesses throughout Tampa Bay. Its mission is to drive economic growth by marketing the region as a preferred destination for conventions and tourism. Keith Bukovan manages the organization's 14 Windows 2003 R2 servers with 500 GB of disk capacity, and he turned to Cybernetics for a solution that would streamline and shorten weekly tape-only full system backups which had become too "complex and time consuming" using two HP DAT libraries connected to two dedicated backup servers. After reviewing other solutions on the market, Bukovan chose the miSAN® V Series, finding it "one of the only all-in-one solutions for our needs" at a price point for capacity that was "extremely competitive."

"Are you kidding me? This is fantastic."

For years, the FLCS has been backing up to DLT drives using what they described as "really old tapes". By the time they were given the order to update their storage system, the department was responsible for over 10,000 tapes. A decreasing backup window only exacerbated the frustration caused by the volume of tapes.

Long back up and data recovery times were proving inadequate for task completion. Running a daily backup alone required a 12-hour window, resulting in excessive department downtime. Sluggish data recovery processes - often taking more than 15 minutes just to load the tapes - were becoming completely unacceptable in an environment where, as Stewart puts it, "when people need something, they usually need it now."

When FLCS IT began searching for a new storage device, they knew exactly what their priorities were: greater capacity and fewer tapes!

After reviewing the challenges faced by the FCLS IT department, Cybernetics Network Storage Analysts had no doubt that the Cybernetics HSTC was the best all-around solution for this site. The HSTC is a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup solution, incorporating tape virtualization for high-speed backup with redundant, removable media archival. With iSCSI connectivity, the HSTC connects directly to the Ethernet network and provides centralized, shared storage for multiple host platforms. The HSTC's integral virtual tape drives are accessible from each server on the network with independent, simultaneous backup streams for each host. After the backup is completed at disk-to-disk speed, the data is archived to tape in an offline mode directly to a locally attached tape device at maximum streaming rate, with no impact on any server operations.

Once Cybernetics introduced Andy Stewart to the HSTC, he recognized it as the solution he'd been searching for. "When I found the HSTC," says Stewart, "I was determined to get it." According to Andy, the HSTC has remedied every problem previously encountered in their backup and recovery procedures. The restores are now "lightning quick" and backups are completed in half the time with a greater amount of data replicated. Perhaps the most tangible benefit for the department is the freedom from tapes, which are now utilized solely for off-site data storage. Overall, FCLS credits the speed and reliability of the HSTC with completely revitalizing their backup operations.