Case Study Customer - Kootenay Lake School District (KLSD) in Canada
Challenge
- Kootenay Lake School District (KLSD) was looking for a private, centralized backup system. Previously, it was working with a collection of different scripts and apps with USB drives and NAS devices, which led to duplication and confusion.
- Challenges needing to be addressed included slow internet connections, simple recovery with versioning, the ability to recover deleted files, and to access any file at any time from any device.
- KLSD needed a system that could work in tandem with the new deduplication features in MS Windows Server 2012
- Additionally, the district was looking for a high level of encryption, alerts, and easy, accurate reporting.
- KLSD has 40 servers within 25 schools and needed to backup approximately 8TB of data.
- In the school district's online search for rsync utilites, it kept coming across Syncrify and decided to give it a try.
Solution
In the summer of 2014, Kootenay Lake School District (grades K-12), purchased Syncrify from Synametrics Technologies. Syncrify is a private-cloud backup software that allows multiple machines to back up files and folders to a central repository within a company's own enterprise. KLSD purchased a Syncrify site license, which is a bundle of 100 licenses, and built a backup server for use in its 25-school district. KLSD is impressed with Syncrify's usefulness, efficiency and ease of implementation, as well as the high level of support that comes with purchase of the system. The district has been so extremely happy with how the private-cloud backup strategy is working, they decided to present a case study about Syncrify at a June 2015 provincial school district convention called ERAC IT4K12 Conference. (For more information, visit
http://it4k12-2015.bcerac.ca/?s=syncrify.)
Educational organizations depend upon on-demand data systems as the lifeblood of business operations - from student and faculty records to professional research and content, administrative applications, and more. Loss of data can prove costly - for example, data containing records, exams and research information.
KLSD made a wise decision in purchasing Syncrify. Since it is a product, and not a service, clients pay once and use it forever. Since backups are done on the customer's own machine and network, there are no usage costs.
Here are some benefits the Syncrify solution provides:
- It is a 100% in-house private cloud solution
- It is a multi-OS solution (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX)
- Clients pay just $15 per machine license, and can then back up as much as desired at no additional cost
- Clients can have unlimited users with unlimited profiles
- It allows backing up computers over the internet using HTTPS
- It uses rsync - meaning it transfers only changes within a file
- It works with Windows 2012 deduplication, meaning it is integrated with Windows 2012 server, is transparent to applications, and allows significant disk saving on the repository
- Clients can easily restore from any machine with a browser
- Clients can synchronize folders
- Clients can access it from mobile devices (IOS, Android, Windows)
- Administrators can get reports as frequently as they like
- Clients receive email notification
- Administrators receive intrusion alerts and IP blocking
The bottom line
The Kootenay Lake School District is so pleased with Syncrify, that it wants to spread the word to other school systems.
Phillip Carpendale, KLSD's Technology Coordinator, says "Syncrify solved so many issues that were important to us. In addition to rsync solving the problem of our slow Wan links, it is centralized, in-house, encrypted, easy-to-use, and the alerts and reporting we obtained have helped us improve performance. The other day, we had a crypto virus infection and because of Syncrify, we were able to restore the data - no problem."
