Resource Library

Pensacola State College

Overview

Founded in 1948, Pensacola State College is the oldest and largest college in the Florida Panhandle; it serves students from Northwest Florida, Southern Alabama and across the country. Today, the school has an enrollment of more than 26,000 students and ranks in the top 100 in the nation in the number of associate degrees awarded. The college offers corporate and professional training, adult and secondary education programs, technical and career programs, university transfer associate degrees, and bachelor degree programs.

PSC relies on a Unisys MCP mainframe environment to manage its college administration systems, which includes student admissions, in-house student records, employee records, and accounts payable. On the open systems side, the IT department is responsible for SQL backups, storing emails used through the campus email system, and data in the college’s content management system.

Challenge

In addition to guidelines outlined by the Florida Department of Management Services, PSC also has policies for internal data storage and backup. Erin Hernandez, the school’s systems support analyst, explains that PSC is on a four week tape rotation, and at the end of each term there were 18 to 20 tapes that were sent to the vault to be stored for five years.

“On weekdays there would be six mainframe tapes and three or four tapes on the open side. A two tape backup drive ran constantly through the weekend to catch up from a week’s worth of data,” said Hernandez. “It was a pain to load and unload all of the physical tapes, and someone had to come into the office on the weekend. Our mainframe backup wouldn’t finish until Monday around noon, which put us behind schedule at the start of each new week.”

Set for a five-year technology refresh, the PSC team decided to evaluate virtual tape alternatives for greater backup and storage efficiency. They were also looking for more robust data encryption options.

Decision and Results

Already a Unisys user and a fan of Dynamic Solutions International, PSC turned to DSI’s mid-range Virtual Tape Library solution. PSC adopted DSI’s VTL3.5 for MCP &O/S; this includes at rest encryption, a de-duplication system, replication, tape encryption and tape consolidation. After a two-day implementation with DSI consultants on site, Hernandez recalls her team was impressed by the improved technology. Hernandez and team immediately felt comfortable using the equipment with little need for additional training.

“The system fit into our existing environment with no issues and right away we noticed the difference,” said Hernandez. “Instead of loading and unloading physical tapes manually, now we just point and click and are able to start our backup processes,” said Hernandez.

She explains that with VTL, PSC’s backup and storage procedures are much more flexible and efficient. She likes that she can make adjustments to the virtual tape system by partitioning the virtual tape to the optimal storage size needed, instead of using a whole physical tape.

Accessing stored data is also easier because PSC can visualize where information is located in the VTL system. The team used to perform a tape inventory or go through each tape to examine physical tape dates when trying to access data, which was time consuming and tedious.

Time Savings and Effective Deduplication

“With VTL we’re saving about an hour a day, and in some cases up to 12 hours per week, because our team isn’t having to load and unload tapes,” said Hernandez. “Operations doesn’t have to come in on the weekends either because they can run backups remotely.”

On the deduplication side, Hernandez likes that the system becomes more efficient over time because it starts to recognize common data patterns. Backups can also run faster with virtual tape because it can run more jobs at the same time for greater throughput. PSC has significantly reduced the amount of physical tape needed because common data is only written once across the VTL system.

 “It’s incredible that now I change tapes with a click of a button as opposed to manually loading physical tapes, which can be finicky,” said Hernandez. “Also, at the end of term on the mainframe side, we’re using tape stacker to take all VTL and move it on to one physical tape; so in a year we’ll be saving thousands of dollars in media costs.”

Looking ahead to the end of term, Hernandez and her team are optimistic about burning from the VTL to physical tape. She’s confident DSI’s support team will be there to answer any questions that may arise along the way. The team is also in the process of updating PSC’s internal backup policies and procedures for securing data.

“We have agreements with neighboring schools to protect our data in the case of a natural disaster so we can ship physical tapes out of harm’s way,” said Hernandez. “Now with DSI’s VTL we’re better protected because we have much faster backups, and if a hurricane is headed our direction we can burn physical tape quickly. It gives us a great deal of confidence to know that our data is secure and protected.” 

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