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ENTERPRISE

BACKUP OVERHAUL

The IT Infrastructure Server Team migrated to a new next-generation backup
solution called CommVault. This was a major project involving the overhaul/
forklift of the existing Actifio/Google backup solution during a short transition
period for all three District data center sites. Over the summer, the new hardware
and software were received, installed, configured, and prepped at all three sites
with the month of August as a pause to avoid any start of school interruptions.
Immediately following, the IT Server Team migrated all VM backups, which
comprise approximately 95% of all District backups, to Commvault. By October,
all school and data center backups were migrated to the new CommVault
backup solution.

The next few months were spent working with the ERP Database Team and the
Microsoft SQL Database Team to create and modify new scripts to integrate
with Commvault for critical restore/refresh processes for production databases
to non-production instances. Once the refresh scripts for the needed processes
were created and tested to interface with Commvault, the ERP database
backups were migrated to Commvault in December and the SQL backups were
migrated in January for full project completion.

In addition, the District follows the general 3-2-1 backup rule which means
there should be 3 copies of data (the production data and 2 backups) with
2 different backup copies and 1 copy offsite. In certain requirements, there
are 4 copies with 2 offsite. Current off-site copies are stored in the Disaster
Data Center at NWRDC in Tallahassee, with an additional copy in the Google
Cloud Platform coming soon. Commvault’s state-of-the-art features include
built-in ransomware protection for the primary backup copy storage, two factor
authentication to access the backups, as well as notification of anomalies as
it analyzes the backup data for large changes that may relate to attacks. The
District standard is 30 days of backup retention for file-level recovery.

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