West Yorkshire Fire Rescue Service (WYFRS) is responsible for maintaining fire and rescue cover for Leeds, Bradford, Kirklees, Wakefield and Calderdale. The authority is an independent body with a duty to provide services that meet the needs of more than two million people, spread over an area of 800 square miles 24-hours a day, every day of the year. Firefighters are trained to cope with a whole range of emergencies, not just fire. They respond to road, rail or air crashes, floods, chemical spills and even terrorist attacks.

These services rely on immediate response times and quick decision making, so it is imperative for the authority to have complete access to all its data at any time, night or day.

There are approximately 1,700 full-time operational personnel in West Yorkshire, a further 161 in the retained ranks, 54 in the control room, and 170 support staff. All of them need to respond quickly to 999 calls and communicate effectively between the 48 fire stations within the authority. Any downtime or loss of data is unacceptable as lives could be placed in danger in the event of a communication breakdown.

Key Challenges
With five district councils and 48 fire stations, one of the biggest IT challenges faced by WYFRS was data protection. With vital enterprise information stored on servers and backed up by tapes in different offices, there was a major risk of data loss or corruption.

The company wanted to centralise its IT infrastructure to ensure that all data could be securely stored in one place to minimise risk an densure system availability at all times.

The authority had a great deal of IT equipment within each district council but without any dedicated IT professionals in place, it was a real struggle to ensure that regular data back-ups were carried out.

Ray Ford, Director of Technical Services at Zycko, said: "Although West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service understood the importance of data-backup and the consequences of losing data, they did not have the right resource in place to ensure that back-up happened on a daily basis. Traditional back-up software requires very fast links to back-up data to a central site but because West Yorkshire and Fire Rescue Service were on call 24 hours a day, they had little time to devote to this important task, placing them at risk from data loss. They needed all their stations to be backuped up at one centralised location."

The authority's tapes were also kept on site and not stored in an off site location to ensure their protection. Regulatory compliance governing data recovery and retrieval placed a further burder on personnel, as it was difficult to recover data in the required time frame from tape. Backing up to tape is an expensive option as it requires ongoing investment in staff, training and technology and supplies for each location.

The authority wanted to replace its tape backup system with a cost effective remote back-up solution that would centralise its data, ensure data protection and minimise risk, and that required minimal IT management.

The existing product used by WYFRS was also problematic, causing the server to go down and crash frequently. They had tried different products by numerous vendors but had been unsuccessful in finding something that would cope with their group wire system that was not part of a wider package.

Moving from Tape to Remote Back-up
WYFRS decided to implement technology from Asigra, one of the leaders in agentless, secure online backup in order to solve its problems.

Following a consultation with Leeds-based reseller Systems Integration and Cabling Limited (SICL) on storage and backup strategy, which had highlighted the opportunity to work with their client WYFRS, Asigra was recommended by both Zycko and SICL.

Zycko had high knowledge of the technology, how to implement it and how to demonstrate it on site. The company had an excellent market reputation for being a cost-effective, highly reliable, high-speed replacement for legacy tape-based, remote site back-up and recovery systems.

The consultation between SICL and its partner Zycko, prior to the recommendation of Asigra to WYFRS, ensured the client would be implementing the best product for the job and proved to be a great opportunity to work together to attain new business.

Based on the advice given by SICL, WYFRS also visited Zycko's headquarters in Cirencester, for a production demonstration. They were then presented with mock up scendarios to ensure the product would be suitable for the different data tha WYFRS needed to store.

WYFRS ordered a 2TB compressed Asigra Televaulting software license and built a vault at the Headquarters site to house the backup data.

The vault was linked to five district offices which backed up clustered Netware servers. Although the HQ stored data permanently, the WYFRS remote sites only stored live information for approximately 30 weeks. There were also numerous applications that required back-up, including Novell, Microsoft, and UNIX.

Henry Baker, Account Manager at SICL commented: "Asigra Televaulting is an ideal replacement for tape. It is easy to set up and manage and centralises enterprise-wide data, while eliminating many of the IT pains associated with traditional back-up. We worked closely with our partners Zycko from initial consultation to ensure we understood the authority's major challenges, through to implementation and solution support."

To ensure that the saving and restoration of staff data ran smoothly, SICL also trained WYFRS IT staff on support and disaster recovery, which included the configuration and testing of backup policies.

Asigra reduced WYFRS' data storage requiremenmts by almost 50% and was easy to use and completely agentless which suited their requirements better. The installation was expected to take two days to complete, but as the implementation and product were of the highest calibre, it only took half a day.

Zycko and SICL also returned to WYFRS to ensure Asigra was effective in solving the authority's problems and to answer any questions that they may have had.

With the use of Asigra Televaulting software, WYFRS feel that storing data has become less tedious for its employees. The product is intelligent as it can decipher between files that have been edited and those that have not, and it saves only the changes made to a document.

As it does not duplicate time resaving whole documents it therefore has reduced back-up time to 15 minutes rather than two hours. It can also store data for up to three months. This has been an invaluable help when researching incidents that may have taken place a while back, but have needed to be investigated again.

The Business Benefits
Centralising remote office and branch office (ROBO) applications and data in the primary data centre offers the following potential advantages:

• Increased IT productivity by leveraging IT administrator assets within the data centre
• Reduced investments in hardware, infrastructure, software, personnel, training and maintenance, and increased data centre asset utilisation
• Better, faster service and simpler management
• Consistent data protection that meets IT and regulatory compliance requirements
• Easier sharing of data among ROBOs