The Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB), the largest hunger-relief organization in New England and among the largest food banks in the country, distributes over 57.7 million pounds of nutritious food each year to people who struggle to have enough to eat.
The last thing they want is for their important services to come to a halt – especially by a preventable cause.
GBFB’s legacy backup and disaster recovery solutions were expensive and, based on three years of disaster recovery testing, were not providing the reliable protection GBFB needed to serve its clients without disruption. In addition, the inefficiency of the backup technology caused continually growing offsite backups and increasing offsite storage costs.
Our active involvement in the testing protocol and experience helping the GBFB team work through some of legacy solution problems gave us a unique vantage point from which to diagnose and mitigate the system design flaws. We recommended a Datto enhanced backup platform that allows virtualization of the backup on the backup appliance. This would provide GBFB with a readily available recovery option locally, and, since the same backup is replicated to the cloud, the same recovery option would exist off site for added security.
The Datto solution provides a significantly faster, more cost effective alternative to traditional mobile recovery services. Once the new backup appliance was on site, new backups were taken and copied offsite within one week. The new system brought offsite storage from 2.5TB down to just under 2TB due to more efficient deduplication and compression, and reduced actual recovery time down to a matter of minutes. Now, even if disaster strikes, GBFB’s data will be available again in a matter of minutes. While data backup is a standard business practice, few businesses intelligently plan for a disaster, or business interruption. Working with the Datto system, we provided GBFB with a single solution that addresses both affordably.
Every company should regularly assess its business plan, incident response plan, business continuity plan, and disaster recovery plan, then find cost effective and technically proficient point products that fill in the gaps. If you need IT guidance and solutions engineered just for you, we are available anytime to talk about the challenges you are facing.
