Stanford University

California, USA
See why Stanford University, one of the world's leading research universities chose Moonwalk to improve data management, reduce the back-up window and enhance compliance and reporting.
Stanford University, California, USA.
Stanford University has chosen Moonwalk to improve data management and realise significant gains through the reduction of expensive primary storage.

Organisation overview.  Stanford University is one of the world's leading research universities.  It's also one of Silicon Valley's largest employers, supporting nearly 20,000 students. 

Key requirements.  Stanford University hierarchical storage management solution to reduce back-up window, reduce volume in primary storage, and enhance compliance and reporting capabilities.

Solution.  Moonwalk software was employed in a mixed environment that included Novell Netware.  Moonwalk was ideal, operating seamlessly across all operating platforms. 

The software protects Stanford's financial data and reduces back-up loads by automatically moving data from primary storage to lower cost devices, according to user-defined rules and policies. 

Moonwalk's new disaster recovery capabilities further enhance the already powerful data protection suite.  It achieves this by reducing the risks, costs, complexity and IT resources required by other systems.

And the unique combination of tools and applications ensures users can always gain access to migrated files, even in the case of catastrophic failure of either the primary or secondary stage.

Moonwalk's extremely small-footprint agents create a 'stub', or pointer, at the original location of the migrated file. The stub and the migrated file have a unique relationship which is contained as part of the metadata in the migrated file. These metadata contain all the information necessary for either the restoration of the stubs or the normal de-migration of the file, including age, size, location, file type, file name, file creator and even more granular classification criteria.

When stubs are lost due to a failure in a server and/or primary storage, Moonwalk software reviews these metadata from a previously migrated set, and restores either the stubs or the full files to a location determined by the system administrator.

Moonwalk's disaster recovery tools not only maintain the continuity and integrity of the migrated environment across the enterprise, they also, as an extension, allow the system administrator to rebuild or repurpose either their front end or back end hardware if they are replacing outdated servers or storage.