Respond! Housing Association

Founded in 1982, Respond! Housing Association designs and builds houses for people who otherwise might not be in a position to provide safe, secure, long-term housing for themselves. Working in partnership with Government, local authorities, and other organisations, Respond! aims to improve living conditions and stimulate social partnership and active citizenship.

Having built over 5,500 homes in Ireland, Respond! is currently responsible for the ongoing management of 4,100 properties around the country. As an Approved Housing Body (AHB), the organisation provides ongoing support to its tenants and the communities in which it works, and employs 250 people nationwide.

Challenge

Having utilised a tape-based backup for a long time, Respond! adopted a 5TB Datto Siris backup solution a number of years ago. However, the organisation’s continued expansion meant that it needed an even more powerful backup and business continuity solution to manage the burgeoning levels of sensitive tenant data that it was tasked with storing. Prior to the latest upgrade, Respond!’s backup appliance was running at 80.2% of available disk space and managing 21 backup agents. As such, it was essential for the association to replace the device before backup space became a critical issue.

Solution

“Our old backup solution was close to capacity since it had been running for a number of years. We needed an even more powerful and scalable alternative which offered increased capacity and the ability to easily restore backups,” said Greg Poland, IT manager, Respond!

“We were looking for a solution which would backup our entire virtual server infrastructure both locally and off site, offering us true protection from downtime, even if our physical hardware has been destroyed,” continued Greg.

Having looked at a number of solutions and providers, Respond! once again opted for a Datto backup and business continuity technology, and chose Datapac, the only Datto Elite Partner in Ireland, to carry out the implementation. The companies had already worked together for a number of years, and so when the decision was made to upgrade, Datapac was the obvious choice. The provider conducted an audit of Respond!’s requirements and installed a Datto Siris SE10000 backup solution, all while minimising disruption to the association’s ongoing work.

“As Respond!’s infrastructure is spread all throughout the country we knew that we needed a comprehensive solution including cloud backup. Datapac understood this, and took the time to research exactly which technology would be the right fit for us. We had an existing relationship with Datapac and we trusted them; they had offered us technical support and consultation for over seven years – that speaks for itself,” said Greg.

Datapac also helped Respond!’s IT department to configure a bespoke Office 365 solution, granting its staff the freedom and flexibility to work from anywhere with an internet connection.

Benefits

Space for expansion

Respond! has experienced a range of benefits from the new Datto solution. First of all, the appliance has eased any concerns regarding available backup space. The new 10TB Datto appliance doubled Respond!’s backup capacity, giving them plenty of room for future expansion, as well as full confidence in face of potential downtime. Under 4TB of the available 10.15TB is currently in use, and all 21 backup agents can be now managed with ease. This also provides plenty of space for expansion, and will see the organisation through a number of years.

Fast recovery

What’s more, the solution backs up all of Respond!’s critical servers offsite giving the customer true business continuity. Whether it’s a hardware failure, malware, or a natural disaster Datto permits the association to instantly restore accounts and operate as usual, while providing the IT team with the time to fix any issues without compromising any data, or incurring downtime. This means that Respond! can continue to serve all of their tenants, and pay particular time and personal attention to those who need them most.

Automatic backups

Greg Poland said: “This new technology saves our team a lot of time, as performing backups used to be very time consuming. Datto is currently set up to automatically back up our systems twice daily, meaning that if anything were to happen to our files we could restore to within four hours. We are confident that backups have been made without errors or data corruption and they are always ready for fast recovery.

“Datapac has provided us with a fantastic product and world-class levels of service and support. Whenever people ask me about our experience with Datapac I’m always ready to sing their praises, and I would happily recommend their services to any organisation.”

Peace of mind

Karen O’Connor, general manager service delivery, Datapac, said: “By increasing the amount of backup space this new solution provides Respond! with absolute peace of mind. Their team can rest assured that the data is safely backed up at any given time, both on premise and into the cloud. We are delighted to have been able to help Respond! once again to find the right solution for their business needs. We will continue to offer them service and support so that they can focus on the great work they are doing around Ireland.”