Teralyte Backup Provides Faster Backups And Cost-Effectiveness For KHOU-TV

By Idealstor LLC

The IT infrastructure at KHOU-TV is managed by Jason Vansco. Like most IT managers at small to medium sized organizations, Jason is responsible for everything IT related including managing PC's and backing up their critical data. Managing multiple tasks was Jason's biggest problem and he found himself spending too much of his valuable time managing backups.

KHOU-TV in Houston had a number of critical servers that were being backed up to direct attached DLT tape. As their data increased, Jason was running into a number of problems with their backups. The amount of data on each server eventually exceeded the capacity of their individual tapes requiring Jason to switch tapes in the middle of his backups. This meant that some backups were running during working hours and were using up valuable bandwidth. In addition, having tape drives in each individual server meant that Jason had to manage multiple backup jobs/tapes per day.

Jason realized that he needed to find a solution to this problem. He needed a centralized backup system that offered both larger capacity media that would allow him to successfully backup all of his data during off hours.

KHOU-TV purchased the Idealstor Teralyte 2000 Rackmount unit. The Teralyte is a removable disk backup system designed to be used in place of tape. The Teralyte 2000 offers two removable drive bays that can accommodate the largest capacity SATA disks on the market (currently 1TB/drive). Each drive bay is recognized as a removable disk target offering up to 2 simultaneous backups per system.

"The Teralyte was exactly what I needed," said Jason Vansco at KHOU-TV. "For the cost of a single LTO-3 drive that only offered me 400GB of native capacity, the Teralyte 2000 gave me up to 2TB of backup space. This is more than we need now but it allows me to grow as we add more data. The backup speeds are far faster backing up to disk and each nightly backup now fits on a single 750GB SATA disk that we purchased online. Not to mention it came with iBac backup software which I now use for my server backups"