BCNET News
Massive Growth in DATA-SAFE Usage Helps Reduce Storage Costs
Higher education institutions are generating more data than ever before and need a safe, cost-effective solution to backup, store and preserve their data collections. To this end, BC’s higher education institutions are widely adopting DATA-SAFE, BCNET’s backup and storage solution and realizing greater service value. As the service operator of DATA-SAFE since 2011, Simon Fraser University has been instrumental in our service success.
This year we experienced a massive growth in DATA-SAFE usage, which is bringing economies of scale to all users and helping to reduce member service fees for secondary backup and storage by as much as 29%. Today, 40% of our members use the service and collectively archive 510 terabytes of backup and storage data inside our Q9 data centre environment in Kamloops,British Columbia.
DATA-SAFE is designed to safeguard data inside British Columbia, but outside the earthquake zone. Users can backup and store their critical data at the shared, dedicated, high-capacity, data centre facility.
Supporting Kwantlen Polytechnic University's Disaster Recovery Strategy
Kwantlen Polytechnic University adopted DATA-SAFE 4 years ago to support the campus disaster recovery strategy. Today, Kwantlen uses the shared service as external storage for a private enterprise backup and recovery software solution. Every month data backups are transmitted over the Advanced Network to the Q9 Data Centre in Kamloops to safeguard their data.
“We use DATA-SAFE because it is a reliable, low-cost solution that allows us to efficiently backup and store our secondary data outside the earthquake zone. Currently we are protecting over 560 terabytes of data backups, while storing 115 terabytes of deduplicated and compressed disc space in DATA-SAFE. Our storage fees will decrease by 21% next year allowing a more affordable solution to support KPU’s disaster recovery needs.”
SUKEY SAMRA
Director, Technology Services - Information Technology (IT)
KPU - Kwantlen Polytechnic University
“This is a great news story. Our shared solution model clearly demonstrates the ability to reduce fees as more institutions get on board to use a service. What’s also cost-effective about DATA-SAFE is that campus data is directly transmitted over the private, high-speed BCNET Advanced Network, bypassing the commodity internet, and reducing institutional networking costs for data backup and storage.”
DEAN CRAWFORD
Director, Shared Systems and Technology
BCNET