SEP sesam at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business

The Situation

An unreliable and faulty backup software solution was creating continual havoc for the staff at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, one of the most renowned business school institutions in the United States.

The university's IT department had installed the software three years prior and from the beginning, even during the installation process, had encountered difficulties. From the outset, the software required special software to incorporate the straightforward infrastructure that existed at the school and the vendor also provided custom patches for other applications provided. The installation, which should have taken only a few days, went on for weeks. Actually the installation never ended and the software never performed up to the manufacturer's promises. During the course of using the old solution, administrators were continually asked to reconfigure and restart their backup systems, even though no changes were ever made to the environment or the network infrastructure.

The Challenge

The backup solution had proven beyond unacceptable; the software was continually failing during minor overnight backup tasks. Each error required a lengthy call to the vendor tech support and often required custom code changes and hot patches. The situation became untenable when the software could not work with the new EMC DL3D1500 Disk Library installed at the school. An active search began for better and more effective backup solution.

The Solution - SEP sesam

Mike Yandrischovitz, Data Systems and Security Manager for the school, contacted SEP engineers, downloaded the software and installed it. Within less than two hours, Mike, along with SEP assistance, was able to get backups for McDonough's most critical applications, a vast improvement over the previous solution, which had required a lengthier setup, and tweaking over several years.

The decision to move from the old vendor was still difficult. The business school staff had invested a great deal financially and even more in time and lost productivity. After three years of continued problems it was decided to make a change and find a new backup software solution. Mike consulted with other members of the Novell user community who recommended he contact SEP.

"James Delmonico, at SEP, had us up and running in hours. I was getting a substantial amount of heat from our user community because our backup solution was unstable. We were not able to get reliable backups for as long as we were using the old backup software solution. Thanks to the SEP sesam solution we had reliable backups almost immediately and restore of critical data for our customers' everyday requirements were fast, easy and accurate. We are now a great fan of the software and the team at SEP," said Yandrishovitz.

"SEP engineers were even instrumental in using the SEP software to help diagnose a configuration problem with our new SAN switch. Isolating the problem, we were able to point directly at EMC. They reconfigured the switch and now, with the new software and new hardware, our backups are complete in less than eight hours."

According to John Carpenter, McDonough IT Director, "SEP sesam and its helpful engineers took a major worry off our plates. The new implementation has performed better than we could have expected; vastly better than the implementation from the previous non-solution. Our staff can now go home on time and I've almost saved back the cost of acquisition of SEP sesam by returning scheduled overtime back to the operating budget. Backups that used to take a whole weekend are now complete in under eight hours."

Results

"Implementing SEP sesam has been truly instrumental in easing the workload and providing a quality backup solution for all of our customers. In fact, the implementation has allowed us to use other equipment including our hundred slot ADIC tape library, which was basically unavailable to us when using the other solution. The time we spend working on backup related issues has shrunk by a factor of 90%. In fact the acquisition cost for SEP sesam was less than our annual maintenance fee for the old back up solution. Call us one happy customer," stated Carpenter.

About McDonough School of Business

Located on the campus of Georgetown University in the new Rafik B.Hariri building, the McDonough School of Business http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=42565 provides educational opportunities for up to 1,000 graduates and over 3,000 undergraduates. The school has a who's who of graduates including Alfredo Christianity, former president of El Salvador, Saad Hariri, Prime Minister of Lebanon, and Barbara Durham, the first woman member of the state of Washington Supreme Court. http://msb.georgetown.edu/