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U Maryland Eastern Shore Consolidates Virtual Machine Backups

The University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) has replaced three separate backup solutions with a single, consolidated solution for its virtual machine backups and offsite archive.

The university had been using one backup solution for its Windows virtual machines, another vendor's product for its Linux virtual machines, as well as tape backup for offsite storage. The university's IT staff "used to spend eight or nine hours on the weekend babysitting backups associated with three other backup solutions," said Joe Noonan, senior product manager for PHD Virtual, in a prepared statement.

After evaluating backup solutions from several vendors, UMES selected PHD Virtual Backup, a virtual backup appliance (VBA) from PHD Virtual Technologies. According to information on the company's site, PHD Virtual Backup is a virtualization backup and replication solution for VMware, Citrix and cloud environments. "UMES really liked the tight integration with the virtual environment due to our virtual appliance architecture and vCenter plugins," said Noonan in a prepared statement.

UMES is using PHD Virtual Backup for backup and recovery of all 150 of its virtual machines. According to the company, the solution backs up both Windows and Linux virtual machines and also provides an automated offsite archive. With the new, unified backup system, UMES has been able to back up databases and other frequently updated systems more often, and also retain more backups. PHD Virtual Backup also includes a Rollback Recovery feature that lets the university roll back to a specific moment in case of a mistake, data loss, or outage.

PHD Virtual Backup has improved the university's data restoration and archival capabilities, while saving time. According to Noonan, IT staff now "spend five minutes checking email reports" instead of monitoring the backup process for hours at a time.

The University of Maryland Eastern Shore is a public university located in Princess Anne, MD. The university serves approximately 4,500 undergraduate and graduate students and employs more than 1,100 faculty and staff.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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