NETGEAR ReadyNAS® Pro Business Edition provides reliable data storage and file retrieval
Background
The King’s College London School of Medicine is one of the largest medical research and teaching centres in Europe, recognised for its research excellence.
The School is located across three hospital-based campuses in Southwark. The Programme in Infection and Immunity at King’s College London is located in the Borough Wing at Guy’s Hospital.
Problem/Objective
As a leading teaching and research facility, reliable data storage and file retrieval across the 150 computers within the programme is imperative.
The programme previously used tape-based backup that had failed due to wear-and-tear. As this method was unreliable, the programme resorted to USB external hard drives; however, this was both expensive and inefficient. The programme’s previous system was backed up only once a week, which meant that if a researcher or lecturer experienced a problem during the week, there would be no way of recovering any lost data.
Following the negative experience of backing up to tape, the programme wanted to move to a reliable disk-to-disk backup system that did not require manual intervention on a frequent basis.
The new disk backup system had three requirements. It needed to feature RAID technology so that data was secured in case of disk failure, have full compatibility with Mac® and Windows® to accommodate all machines within the programme, and have sufficient capacity to protect and share a large number of files and documents, which could easily be increased as and when required.
"The programme assessed the various storage vendors and chose NETGEAR ReadyNAS® Pro, due to its class-leading performance and X-RAID2 capabilities."
Solution
The programme assessed various storage vendors and chose to implement NETGEAR ReadyNAS® Pro Business Edition, due to its class-leading performance and X-RAID2 automatic RAID management capabilities. The latter means the IT manager can simply add the disks, choose the required level of RAID and let the ReadyNAS do the rest. Using X-RAID2, the IT manager can also replace with hard drives of a higher capacity on the fly, simply adding capacity as required, meaning he can protect his initial hardware investment with zero down time.
Two ReadyNAS Pros are deployed in different locations within the programme, with the NETGEAR embedded backup technology enabling the data to be replicated between the two devices. X-RAID2 with dual parity (RAID6) is enabled to prevent any data loss through disk failure. A third ReadyNAS unit is isolated offsite, containing a further backup of the programme’s data. This acts as an additional layer of data security in case the two onsite devices are physically damaged. Executing the backups is simple using the ReadyNAS Pro’s included CDP software.
The Mac® compatibility of the ReadyNAS Pros provides a ‘one-stop solution’ to fulfil all of the programme‘s storage requirements. Support for Apple Time Machine, offered by the ReadyNAS Pro, allows automatic Mac® backups using embedded Time Machine software.
By deploying the ReadyNAS Pro, the programme’s data is always protected and the risk posed by potential disasters is greatly reduced – ultimately, data is backed up and recoverable at all times.
Due to the success of the ReadyNAS implementation, the IT staff plan to replace the department’s file server with an additional ReadyNAS solution from NETGEAR, and expect similar storage models to be adopted by the college’s departments in the future.
"By deploying the ReadyNAS Pro, the programme’s data is always protected and the risk posed by potential disasters is greatly reduced – ultimately, data is backed up and recoverable at all times."
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