Rugby club scores with automated backup

A world class UK rugby club has turned to an automatic back-up system after data critical to the running of the club was wiped out.

Northampton Saints Rugby Football Club, winners of the Heineken European Cup in 2000 and former home of England 2003 World Cup Winners Ben Cohen and Matt Dawson, suffered a major data loss three years ago that affected the running of the club.

The Saints lost a lot of vital data, spurring it to move away from slow, unreliable tape backup systems that are prone to corruption, to a system run by Asigra and Datastore 365.

The system automatically copies every file on the club's systems at its city grounds in Franklin Gardens to Datastore 365's servers in Northampton and Berkshire.

It backs up 120GB of stored data from three Windows 2003 servers, including an Active Directory server, a Microsoft Exchange SQL server and a general file server.

It allows the club to protect its vast amount of sensitive and critical data, including video analysis of matches for researching the opposition's tactics and training the players, retail data from the two stadium shops, emails, all files of players' contracts and medical records and accounting data.

The system is so precise it allows the club to restore anything down to an individual email without the disruption of having to restore an entire server.

Former European cup winning player and head of technical analysis at the Saints, Ali Hepher, said: "The system went down for about 10 days and it practically brought the running of the club to a standstill. They were able to recover bits but not everything.

"There is a vast amount of storage space needed to keep all this important technical data on the games. The beauty of the Datastore 365 system is that we can relax if anything goes wrong in future and know it will be instantly accessible."

The data is generated in four different locations in and around the stadium, due to the diverse nature of the business, so there is a further advantage in having a centralised backup.

Before the backup data set is transmitted to the Datastore 365 data centres, the Asigra Televaulting software analyses the data, finds new and changed file blocks from the previous backup, eliminates duplicate files and further compresses the residue bytes to ensure the backup set is as compact as possible.

The software then encrypts the data before sending it over an IP WAN connection to a centralised Asigra Televaulting DS-System server, located in Datastore 365's primary data centre, which consolidates the backup data.