City of Overland Park has installed two Revinetix Sentio backup and recovery appliances to protect Exchange, SQL, Oracle, and other network servers, has announced recently Revinetix, a pioneer in Disk2Disk2Disk™ backup solutions. Overland Park has more than 120 computer servers to sustain police, fire, public works and other city operations. The City also controls critical public safety dispatch servers for Johnson County, as well as the emergency operations center servers for the Mid-America Regional Council, the regional planning organization for Greater Kansas City.

    To guard these mission-important data systems, the City historically utilized Compaq® SDLT Tape Libraries and Veritas® Backup Exec™ solutions. Overland Park’s largely Windows®-based computer servers can handle between 1,000 and 1,300 users at any given time and host more than 15 Terabytes of information. Over time, Overland Park’s tape backup tools became outdated, cumbersome and lacked the performance and storage capacity required. Reliability, as well as administrative overhead, were also notable concerns.

    Overland Park Network Administrator Randy Oehrle, stated: “Backups were running 24 hours a day — there was no such thing as a backup window. I couldn’t back everything up in a reasonable time. It was a challenge to say the least. There were so many things that could go wrong, and I was spending literally 90% of my time rotating and recataloging tapes, searching through backups.”

    Overland Park reviewed proposals from EMC, CommVault, Veritas, and their associated Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) as part of the public Request for Proposal (RFP) process. Revinetix’ Value-Added Reseller (VAR) Yellow Dog Networks presented a disk-based alternative, the Revinetix Sentio 4000 appliance.

    Oehrle added: “I wrote the RFP with VTLs in mind, but I left it open-ended with caveats for specifications, in case this may not be the best or optimal solution. Everyone had the same dog and pony show, except for Revinetix. Revinetix and Yellow Dog Networks proposed to eliminate tape altogether. I had nothing but problems with tape, so this was great. In the end, the two things that cast votes for Revinetix were the simplicity of the solution and the price. The simplicity was tremendous, browser-based, and it was significantly less expensive. For CommVault, NetWorker and Veritas, support is outrageous. For my environment support costs would have cost roughly $30,000 a year, not counting if I added anything. For three years, you’re talking almost $100,000 just for support, forget the hardware. They are very capable, very complex products, but my gosh, Veritas is not intuitive, nor easily deployed. Simplicity is the kicker. The software licensing for Revinetix is great. If I have a million servers, I have all of the agents. With Veritas or CommVault, I have to add a server and add another agent and that costs so much money. That is really a hassle, whereas now I am licensed to do that and I am done.”