South Tahoe Public Utility District
Formed in 1950, the South Tahoe Public Utility District is a public agency serving South Lake Tahoe and El Dorado County. The district provides wastewater collection, treatment and recycling and drinking water to the communities.
Challenge
South Tahoe Public Utility District wanted to provide its users the assurance that they could maintain continuity of service in the midst of a server outage. "We worried a lot about servers breaking down, and how we would restore service if we had to replace that server or rebuild it from scratch," said Bill Frye, network/telecom systems administrator for South Tahoe Public Utility District. "If a server was out of commission, it could take two to three days to recover, and that's the best case scenario. This could disrupt important processes, such as accounts payable and payroll."
Installing a duplicate server was cost-prohibitive. "If we bought a new duplicate server it would have required a tremendous financial investment," said Frye. "The expense was just too much. Plus we just don't have the physical space for an additional server."
Novell Solution
The district found the PlateSpin Forge® appliance from Novell an attractive alternative. "There's no other product like PlateSpin Forge on the market," said Frye. "We found its ability to move workloads to new hardware very useful. The fact that it automatically and consistently copies images from the server without requiring a lot of work is a huge advantage to us."
Today, the district uses PlateSpin Forge to protect ten Windows-based server workloads, including Microsoft SQL; Microsoft Exchange; a domain controller; IIS server and application servers such as accounting, billing, maintenance and plant monitoring systems. If a server fails, workloads can be quickly moved to the PlateSpin Forge appliance until they can be restored to the production environment.
In short order, the district's investment in PlateSpin Forge paid off. A critical application server failed and the IT team needed to recover quickly. "We were able to switch over to PlateSpin Forge within 30 minutes," said Frye.
The appliance performed perfectly. "Following the server outage, and while we sorted out what we were going to do for new hardware, we ran on the PlateSpin Forge appliance for almost two weeks," said Chris Skelly, information technology systems specialist II for South Tahoe Public Utility District. "Users had no degradation of service and weren't even aware of the switch."
Results
By implementing a PlateSpin Forge appliance, the district has significantly reduced server recovery time from days to hours at a fraction of the cost of having a duplicate server. "The biggest benefit of PlateSpin Forge is the peace of mind that we have an image of our critical servers and can start running within a short time frame in case of a hardware failure," said Frye. "The appliance provides us with a small duplicate of critical systems in a single affordable package that's easy to support. That's a very big advantage for us."
With the appliance in place, the district gained the ability to protect all its critical workloads. "Even if we had a duplicate server in place, we wouldn't have had the space to back up all of our critical workloads," said Frye. "The Novell appliance has given us additional capabilities we couldn't otherwise have afforded."
When the district's application server failed, the organization was able to save money when migrating to the new hardware. "Our vendor would have charged us $5,000 to migrate the workloads to a new server," said Frye. "Instead, we avoided this cost altogether by taking an image from PlateSpin Forge and restoring that to the new server. This also saved us a lot of time. The migration would have taken all day instead of just a few hours time it took with PlateSpin Forge."
In addition, the appliance saved the district a lot of time getting the new hardware setup. "Without PlateSpin Forge in place, we would have really been scrambling, as it could easily take 25-30 staff hours to get a new server up and running," said Frye. "With PlateSpin Forge, we had the new server up and running within just three to four hours."