Union Grove High School

The Challenge

Meko Stanosevic, director of technology and network administrator, is the only IT staff person at Union Grove High School. He is charged with running and managing all the servers, storage and networks at the school. Stanosevic reports, “It can get pretty overwhelming at times.” He inherited a large Unitrends Recovery Series backup appliance when he joined the school staff several years ago. This Unitrends backup appliance performed well for the frequent requests Stanosevic received to recover lost or accidentally deleted files.

However, like many busy schools with limited budgets, Union Grove had been running outdated servers and storage. To remedy that situation, Stanosevic scheduled a full system upgrade. The project was planned for summer to keep any negative impacts or downtime from disrupting the school program.

Stanosevic expected only some mild hiccups during the upgrade. However instead, he found himself in the middle of a schoolwide system outage. The upgrade caused a complete shutdown of all applications because, unknown to the storage vendor, the solid-state drives attached to the controller were incompatible with the latest version of VMware.

Fortunately, prior to the system upgrade, Stanosevic had done a full backup of all his files and VMs onto the Unitrends Recovery Series appliance.

“Next day I came into work and to my horror, all VMs were offline and unreachable.”

Stanosevic says, “I immediately started restoring the VMs from my Unitrends backups that I took the night before, and the school was up and running in no time. We would have lost everything if we didn’t have them.”

Follow Up

The Unitrends Recovery Series appliance worked perfectly to bring the high school back online. “Unitrends saved the day from my summer catastrophe,” says Stanosevic. In fact, Stanosevic was so impressed that he upgraded the school’s Unitrends backup appliance to a larger version with 15TB of suggested backup capacity.

“I stayed with Unitrends for the ease of use and exceptional customer service. It gives me peace of mind knowing I have quality backups and great product support.”