“Thank you, Unitrends. I really don’t know how I would do my job without you. You literally save me many hours a week.“

The Challenge

Like many local government agencies, the IT administrators at LYNX must meet strict data backup compliance requirements on limited budgets. For example, the standard adult one-way bus fare is only $2, which makes it difficult for LYNX to raise operating revenues for their IT department. However, state law requires that IT departments backup government data on multiple types of media.

LYNX was previously using Arcserve and LTO tapes to manage their backups. Ed Lydiard, Network Support Specialist, was charged with managing the backup process and their “vast” tape library housed at a remote fireproof site. Florida law requires that “preservation duplicates of permanent or long-term records must be stored in an off-site storage facility with constant temperature (below 68 degrees Fahrenheit) and relative humidity controls.” Lydiard was spending multiple hours per week making and managing tapes as well as spending over two hours for each data recovery request. “While we would love to get off of tapes, we can’t per Florida law,” said Lydiard.

“[Before Unitrends], managing and making backup tapes was consuming a large part of my job.”

In 2013, Lydiard began looking for a simpler and more flexible backup solution. The LYNX IT team soon found that Unitrends Recovery Series physical appliances and RXDA removable disk drives would meet the organization’s requirement for physical backup media, but with much greater flexibility — with Unitrends, file creation and recoveries are extremely fast. Lydiard also liked Unitrends’ capability of backups automatically replicating to a remote site as well as the ability to run production applications on the backup appliance if a server were to fail. Unitrends also offered the option of easily integrating with the cloud if Florida law were to change. LYNX purchased two Unitrends Recovery Series 713 appliances with RXDA media controllers. The transportation agency has now been using Unitrends backup and archiving solutions for eight years and counting.

Follow Up

Lydiard now spends less of his time managing backups and physical media. LYNX does daily incremental backups of their entire data set and full backups of their SQL database. Several times, LYNX employees have deleted critical directories and Lydiard has been able to recover them with Unitrends’ “near-instant” recovery capabilities.

In 2019, LYNX upgraded to two Unitrends Recovery Series 8032S hardware appliances.

“We gave [our older Unitrends appliances] to another government agency so they could have the same backup advantages we have.”