College Consolidates Entire Backup Environment into one Easy-to-use Solution with SEP Software

College Consolidates Entire Backup Environment into one Easy-to-use Solution with SEP Software

SEP Backs up College’s Data 25 Times Faster than Competitors

Boulder, CO - December 22, 2015 – Highland Community College needed one backup and disaster recovery solution to tie everything together: one vendor, one point of contact, one main backup server and one backup and disaster recovery plan. The college wanted to leverage a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup strategy that would modernize their backups, eliminate redundancy and ideally have one vendor-supported application.

In the past, the college had multiple backup solutions in place to meet their needs and ended up with multiple backup infrastructures. Ultimately, they were using Arcserve to back up file and print servers, vRanger to back up their virtual environment and an assortment of different scripts to cover databases and applications. This required multiple backup servers, multiple targets for disk storage and three tape systems.

Highland Community College selected SEP Software as their new backup and disaster recovery solution because it would support their entire current environment as well as any foreseeable changes in the future. Nathan Hensal, Director of Information Technology Services explained, “Our goal was to modernize and consolidate our IT infrastructure and we felt that SEP was the only product we tested that offered the level of reliability and flexibility for the future that we had envisioned.”

“Switching to SEP allowed us to consolidate from three backup platforms down to one. After calculating the time our old backup software took and factoring in our data growth, we can confidently say SEP completes our full backups over 25 times faster than our old solution,” Hensal said. “I think SEP is a very capable, well-engineered product. Everything is well thought out, straight- forward to use and is modular in its design once you determine the who, what, when, and where.”

“I am very satisfied,” said Hensal, whose favorite feature of SEP is the ability to monitor real-time job status. “It’s really nice to leave SEP running in the background. I can check it and see a large amount of backup detail all on one screen. It’s a single pane of glass for looking at all backup status information for both real-time and historical purposes. I would recommend SEP to other colleges, universities or anyone for that matter.”

This past year, the college experienced a catastrophic disaster that completely eliminated one of their SANs. Hensal reported to SEP that having SEP running made him feel at ease when he may otherwise have been in a panic, because he knew that regardless of what happened to the SAN, he would be able to get all of his data back using SEP. Ultimately, the college’s SAN vendor came through for them and was able to get everything back from the destroyed SAN. But Hensal said it was outstanding to have that level of confidence in a product like SEP at such a stressful time.

About Highland Community College

Highland Community College offers more than 60 programs of applied and transfer degrees, community education and business training. In addition to comprehensive academic programming, Highland provides theatre, art and music opportunities for the community. Highland Community College is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and is a member of the North Central Association’s Academic Quality Improvement Program. Located in Freeport and Elizabeth, Highland is conveniently positioned in the Chicago tristate region with access to several major metropolitan areas. To find out more, visit http://highland.edu/.

About SEP Software Corp.

SEP Software offers a single backup and disaster recovery solution for heterogeneous environments of any size. SEP's flagship solution, SEP sesam, uses its multi-streaming technology to facilitate unlimited simultaneous data streams to provide some of the highest performance in the backup market. SEP is cross-platform, multi-OS, and supports every popular database and Groupware solution available. Exceptional remote management capabilities allow users to easily and efficiently manage thousands of locations around the globe from one central location. SEP specializes in replacing multiple backup software products with one standardized solution for the entire enterprise. For more information, visit www.sepusa.com.