Hamilton County Protects IBM OS/400 Data with Carbonite Cloud Backup

Kirby Winter is a one-person IT team responsible for managing the entire IT infrastructure for the government offices of Hamilton County, Iowa and Webster City, the county’s biggest municipality.

Winter spends his days administrating servers and troubleshooting personal computers, laptops and printers. He’s also responsible for making sure that country and city data remains secure and protected from disasters.

Hamilton County depends heavily on an IBM Power5 server running IBM OS/400 to manage important financial data, including the payroll for government employees and the property tax system for residents. They also use the IBM/OS 400 system to manage and pay its many suppliers. 

“If we ever lost that data we’d be in a world of hurt,” Winter said. “That’s why we use Carbonite Cloud Backup.”

The county also uses Carbonite to protect 10 Microsoft Windows-based servers and data stored in endpoint devices, such as desktop and laptop computers used by employees and department heads. Winter is also in the process of “spinning up” a virtual server using VMware. He plans to use Carbonite to protect that virtual machine, as well.

From Tape to Cloud

In the early 2000s, Hamilton County used a tape-based backup solution to protect server data. But the system was difficult to manage, and recovering files and folders took far too long. The county kept a backup tape for each day of the week and stored four weeks’ worth of tape at a time. If a file was accidentally deleted or corrupted, Winter would have to spend time digging through the tapes and reloading the information.

“But now with Carbonite, I can just go in and quickly find the file I need and restore it,” he said. “Recovering files takes hardly any time at all.”

What is Carbonite Cloud Backup?

Carbonite Cloud Backup Powered by EVault is a data protection solution that backs up all types of business data to the cloud. It keeps physical and virtual systems protected with point-in-time restore that enables users to turn back the clock when disaster strikes. Features include:

Carbonite Cloud Backup also supports more than 200 operating system versions and applications. 

Carbonite Makes File Recovery Easy

Winter appreciates the fact that Carbonite offers granular restore, which makes the process of recovering individual files and folders fast and painless. And he doesn’t miss digging through clunky tapes to restore files. 

He is also familiar with the role human error can play in data protection. A Webster City employee once accidentally deleted an entire digital folder and needed it back right away. The folder included pricing and other information related to items that the city’s utilities office regularly provides to other departments—things like power polls, fiber optics cables, condensers and capacitors.

“I wasn’t at the location at the time, but I was able to quickly log into my Carbonite account and restore the folder from the cloud right to where it needed to be on the server,” Winter explained. “It only took a few minutes.”

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