Graduation is the end of a college education but it’s also the beginning of a new career or post-graduate opportunity. It’s time to celebrate endings and new beginnings, as the school year draws to a close and summer makes its tantalizing approach (yes, even for storm-battered U.S. east coasters). This seasonal shift makes us happy… and apparently life as a student at Brown University in historic Providence, Rhode Island is a happy place too.
Brown University has an impressive 250 years of education under its Ivy League belt and, according to a 2010 Princeton Review, in addition to getting an exceptional education, its 15,000+ students are the happiest in America.
I don’t know about you, but I’m smiling, which brings me to the point of this blog. There’s another member of the Brown community who has something to be happy about. Nancy Majors, Associate Director for Disaster Recovery and Storage Services at Brown University, tells us why in this Data Protection Cube conversation.
I think Brown University is a great example of an organization that was going through the motions of backup, but had never attempted a full recovery the data. The University’s legacy and modern requirements added a great deal of demand on its aging data centers and tape storage services. In order to deal with these issues, the University needed to rebuild their data centers with business continuity and data recovery built-in.
Happily, Nancy is now able to promise watertight disaster recovery, especially critical when she thinks about recent disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Today, Brown uses Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) replication software to protect its databases and mainframe and utilizes RecoverPoint continuous data protection tool to safeguard its VMware environment. Additionally, instead of shipping tape drives to a third party, the university now performs network backups internally with an in-house Data Domain deduplication appliance. Data is replicated to a secondary site in New York to ensure reliable recovery.
Smile! You’re in the data protection zone!