Jefferson Parish schools receives backup from Dell

Published 5 July 2006

Redundancy: The new word the year — or at least during hurricane season — for Jefferson Parish’s public school system; Dell is helping the parish build a better system that will withstand any future disasters by sending important data to be stored in off-site locations

After losses from last year’s hurricane season, the Jefferson Parish Public School System (JPPSS) has joined with Dell to create a three-pronged data backup infrastructure. Lying just south of New Orleans, Jefferson Parrish was one of the hardest hit areas in the Gulf Region. There are more than forty thousand students registered and more than three thousand teachers in Jefferson parish. In this collaboration, Dell will provide JPPSS with a data backup system that will provide redundancy for parish-wide computer systems, and also remote data centers.

The Marerro, Louisiana district school board office will be the first backup site for data from the JPPSS, where information from all office and school servers citywide will continuously flow to Dell/EMC CX 500 network storage systems and a Dell PowerVault(TM) tape library. An identical of this site will also be built in Metairie, which will automatically replicate all information going to the Marerro site. Another site will be built in Lafayette, 140 miles inland, to ensure that if there is damage to the two previous centers data will not be lost during a disaster. This site will use Dell’s PowerVault tape library to backup information at pre-scheduled intervals.

After last year’s losses, we knew we needed a reinforced backup and recovery system to streamline both our disaster response capabilities and our everyday operations,” said Alfred Johnson, director of technology for the school system.

JPPSS will get more help from Dell in disaster preparedness training this August. To ensure that the hardware put in place is used as efficiently, Dell will be training JPPSS IT officials how to use the new backup systems through full-scale simulations.