Recognizing its services are critical to the well being of the community, Goodwill Industries International has deployed a new business continuity and disaster recovery solution from McDATA Corporation to ensure its job training and placement services are available to clients at all times. Nearly 850,000 people took advantage of Goodwill’s employment services in 2006 to get back on their feet, and the organization’s ability to provide these services throughout the year is vital, making access to Goodwill’s business applications and client information a mission-critical issue.

“Our existing tape backup solution just wasn’t getting the job done efficiently. We had one instance where a failed Exchange server took too long to restore and merge the databases, adversely affecting business operations,” said Steve Bergman, chief information officer, Goodwill. “With the McDATA solution, we know that our business applications won’t go down when needed the most and our data is protected and can be recovered easily.”

Tired of relying on inefficient tape backups and frustrated at the long restore times, Goodwill tabbed McDATA to set up its Replicator appliances that seamlessly replicate data over Goodwill’s existing network infrastructure from a data center in Washington, D.C., to a remote disaster recovery site in Milwaukee. High availability connectivity to the remote site is provided by two McDATA Eclipse SAN routers. In case of downtime caused by a corrupted server, a data center outage or regional disaster, Goodwill’s business applications — systems that employees use to access client information, share best practices and documents and communicate effectively — automatically failover to the Milwaukee site.

In the future, the non-profit plans to offer replication services to other Goodwill agencies, starting with three in the first quarter of 2007. Data that supports local operations such as Goodwill’s retail stores will be replicated to the disaster recovery site, providing even greater and more complete data protection.

www.mcdata.com

•Date: 24th January 2007 • Region: US •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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