By Calvin Zito

My good friend Sal Simili is a jack of all trades at Compass Public Charter School in Meridian, Idaho just outside of Boise.  Sal has been the IT manager (initially as a volunteered when the school was first starting) and also teaches a technology class at Compass. 

He was an early adopter of our HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System. A couple of weeks ago, Sal and I were catching up over coffee at a local Moxie Java.  During the conversation, he mentioned to me that he had to restore a file from the D2D.  He told me that he has the D2D set up to do regular, nightly backups of his data using HP Data Protector Express.  This all happens automatically, which was the cool part of what he talked to me about.  It's all so automatic that he forgot the D2D was there.  He told me that he does a weekly full backup to a removable disk drive that he takes offsite so ait was easy to forget about the D2D.

I asked Sal to send me an email describing what happened and here's what he said: "I had to restore a file that was lost (for the first time in a long time).  I had almost forgot that the D2D was there because I rarely need to restore a file. I was able to get my file back with no problem. Then I decided to take a look at the web interface to see how the D2D machine was doing. It had been running for 378 days without a reboot. I checked through the logs and it had kept backing up our data every night without a glitch. That's kinda bad because I should check it more often but we really use it as a disaster recovery more than normal file recovery. I was very impressed that the machine had been running over a year without reboot and without errors! Tell your friends at StorageWorks that you guys are building some pretty awesome machines."

Here's a video that gives a good introduction to the D2D Backup System.

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