“Unitrends saved over 20 years of data and I will forever be grateful for the decision to bring you on board!“

The Challenge

Several years ago, Pearl County chose Data Star Inc., a local Managed Service Provider (MSP), to supply advanced IT operations and support. Jesse Taylor is an IT Administrator for Data Star who spends all his time on site at the county seat, working to ensure IT operations run smoothly. Shortly after arriving at the county, Taylor began to investigate the backup and recovery capabilities of Pearl River. “I was told they were adequate, but when we dug into it, we really didn’t know if the backups were good or we could really recover,” Taylor said. Data Star, a reseller of Unitrends, recommended that Pearl County invest in a Unitrends Recovery Series appliance to protect the county’s data.

The county purchased a Unitrends Recovery Series 824S appliance in early 2018 to protect several of the virtualized servers and NAS devices on which the county runs its operations. In June 2019, four hard drives supporting a virtualized NAS failed simultaneously, putting almost 7TB of data at risk. The drives stored county maps, documents for the circuit county court, judges’ documents, hearing lists and other critical information. Taylor explained, “You are never really sure that everything will work correctly but we restored everything from the Unitrends appliance. Unitrends saved over 20 years of data and I will be forever grateful for the decision to bring you on board!”

“During the outage, I had hope, but wasn’t sure. After the restore completed successfully, and the spin-up of a virtual server was a success, I was finally able to breathe again.”

Follow Up

A second server that was protected with Windows Backup failed shortly thereafter. However, since the Unitrends Recovery Series appliance worked so well, it now protects this server too.

For extra protection, Pearl River added RXDA removable media to their Unitrends appliance. Each day, a drive with a full backup is removed from the appliance and locked in a fireproof box. “It’s not optimal,” Taylor said, “but it works for us. We would love another appliance at the remote Sheriff’s office and hope to add that soon.”