Digitiliti

Remember the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears? Too hot, too cold, just right. Too hard, too soft, just right. The story of how Macalester College found the right data storage and disaster recovery solution in Digitiliti has the same theme. Macalester’s tape backup system was too small. “We had outgrown our tape system. It didn’t have the capacity we needed and wasn’t fast enough,” says Ted Fines, Assistant Director of Network Services at Macalester College. “We were looking at getting a much more powerful system, an enterprise solution.”

Upgrading its system, however, would have been a big a project for the private liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minn. To meet its needs in house, the college would have had to incur about $200,000 - $300,000 in upgrade expenses, including hardware, backup packages, courier fees to transport tape offsite, and licensing fees, estimates Steven Bishop, Vice President of Sales for Digitiliti. “A school, with many different departments and different servers, pays a lot more for licensing than a business,” he says “It was too much.”

While cost definitely was a concern, Fines saw the biggest disadvantage of an upgrade as the fact that a new tape backup system is still a tape backup system. “Managing all the tapes and tape drives is a hassle,” he says. “Restoring from tape is labor intensive and time intensive.”

Digitiliti – agent-less technology that offers a secure, online, remote backup solution – was the right solution at the right time. Fines jumped at the opportunity to become Digitiliti’s first customer in 2005. “For many organizations, it’s a clear-cut case to go with Digitiliti,” says Bishop. “They have a need for higher availability, want to get rid of tape, need a faster restore point, need data off site, need encryption. Like Macalester, they put those needs together, and Digitiliti makes perfect sense.”