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Article · Feb 22, 2018

Hamilton County protects IBM OS/400 data with Carbonite Cloud Backup

Find out why Hamilton County and Webster City depend on Carbonite Cloud Backup.

Kirby Winter is a one-person IT team responsible for managing the entire IT infrastructure for the government offices of Hamilton County, Iowa and Webster City, the county’s biggest municipality. 

Winter spends his days administrating servers and troubleshooting personal computers, laptops and printers. He’s also responsible for making sure that county and city data remains secure and protected from disasters.

Hamilton County depends heavily on an IBM Power8 server running IBM OS/400 to manage important financial data, including the payroll for government employees and the property tax system for residents. The county also uses the IBM OS/400 system to manage and pay its many suppliers.

“If we ever lost that data we’d be in a world of hurt,” Winter said. “That’s why we use CarboniteTM Cloud Backup.”

Winter uses Carbonite to protect a total of 10 Microsoft Windows-based servers used by the county and the city. Additionally, he uses Carbonite to protect data that county and city employees store in endpoint devices like desktop and laptop computers. Winter is also in the process of “spinning up” a virtual server using VMware. He plans to use Carbonite to protect that virtual machine as well.

From tape to cloud
In the early 2000s, Hamilton County used a tape-based backup solution to protect server data. But the system was difficult to manage and recovering files and folders took far too long. The county kept a backup tape for each day of the week and stored four weeks’ worth of tape at a time. If a file was accidentally deleted or corrupted, Winter would have to spend time digging through the tapes and reloading the information.

“But now with Carbonite, I can just go in and quickly find the file I need and restore it,” he said. “Recovering files takes hardly any time at all.”

What is Carbonite Cloud Backup?
Carbonite Cloud Backup Powered by EVault is a data protection solution that backs up all types of business data to the cloud. It keeps physical and virtual systems protected with point-in-time restore that enables users to turn back the clock when disaster strikes. Features include:

• Secure offsite data protection
• Support for cloud or virtual environments
• Centralized, web-based monitoring and management dashboard
• Flexible retention options, up to 7 years
• Award-winning technical support available 24/7

Carbonite Cloud Backup also supports more than 200 operating system versions and applications.

Carbonite makes file recovery easy
Winter appreciates the fact that Carbonite offers granular restore, which makes the process of recovering individual files and folders fast and painless. And he doesn’t miss digging through clunky tapes to restore files.

He is also familiar with the role human error can play in data protection. A Webster City employee once accidentally deleted an entire digital folder and needed it back right away. The folder included pricing and other information related to items that the city’s utilities office regularly provides to other departments—things like power polls, fiber optics cables, condensers and capacitors.

“I wasn’t at the location at the time, but I was able to quickly log into my Carbonite account and restore the folder from the cloud right to where it needed to be on the server,” Winter explained. “It only took a few minutes.”

Learn more about Carbonite Cloud Backup today.

Author

Mark Brunelli

Senior Writer

Mark Brunelli is a Senior Writer on the Corporate Marketing team at Carbonite. He blogs about Carbonite happenings and IT industry trends.

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