Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) uses GroupWise post offices to enable communication and collaboration between 5,000 users and 93 schools and administration facilities. It has become an integral part of operations and is essential for the school district to function properly.
Disaster recovery is necessary for any organization that relies on its email systems. Accidents and disasters happen and could result in catastrophes for organizations that are not prepared. For SCUSD, being prepared for such events is essential.
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Initially, the IT department was using a third party backup solution that utilized tape backups in order to secure the GroupWise system. It had difficulty getting a timely backup of the GroupWise post offices, as it usually would take three days to complete a full backup cycle. This is typical of third-party solutions that are not built specifically for GroupWise, and an extensive system such as this one (5,000 users in 93 locations) can be difficult to manage. Fortunately for the school district, a more effective solution existed.
GroupWise Disaster Recovery is Micro Focus’s solution for GroupWise disaster recovery. It offers the fastest backup and disaster recovery tool available for GroupWise, delivering quick message restore as well as hot backups of post offices and domains, ensuring that critical data is always current and available. The software fit perfectly for this school district in Sacramento because it needed immediate backups capable of quick disaster recovery.
Disaster Recovery works using a collector/server model, which can install a Collector on the Linux server that houses the GroupWise Post Office or Domain. The GroupWise Disaster Recovery Collector then gathers the contents of a GroupWise post office OFUSER and OFSMG directory into a staging area on the local GroupWise server. RSYNC technology is used to replicate the contents of the post office to the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server. This new architecture creates faster backups, backup redundancy, elimination of the need to have an on-premises GroupWise Disaster Recovery Server, and less required disk space and processing power.
The solution saved SCUSD time, money, and effort by cutting their backup times from three days down to just a few minutes. With backups now occurring daily, the district is prepared for any disaster and knows that at the push of a button it can restore the GroupWise system.
Because GroupWise Disaster Recovery integrates with the Restore feature of GroupWise, recovering an email or calendar item is simple. When an employee of the school district calls the GroupWise Administrator, Barbara Gallegos, to restore an email or calendar item, it only takes her about 15 minutes to get it done. Prior to GroupWise Disaster Recovery, restoring items took several hours. Just as with message recovery, Gallegos was delighted to find that she could also easily recover GroupWise address book information and restore a user’s address books. Now, with GroupWise Disaster Recovery, restoring an address book is almost as simple as restoring message and calendar items.
