Dell Customizing Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Infrastructure for Louisiana School District; Jefferson Parish School District Will Protect Critical Records in Three Data Centers

Business Wire, July 5, 2006

ROUND ROCK, Texas -- Jefferson Parish Public School System (JPPSS) has teamed with Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) to create a three-pronged data backup and recovery infrastructure outside New Orleans.

New data centers, along with a comprehensive information-technology disaster recovery plan, will help safeguard the Katrina-ravaged district against future losses of student and administrative records.

By the time the district's 40,457 students and 3,054 teachers return to the classroom this fall, all data used to make the school day run smoothly -- including student transcripts, transportation routes, library records, food inventory and payroll -- will now have a central home rather than being backed up at individual campuses.

The district's school board office in Marerro, La., marks the first stop for data, where information from all office and school servers citywide will continuously flow to Dell/EMC CX 500 network storage systems and Dell PowerVault(TM) tape library for backup. A second, identical backup center 10 miles away in Metairie will then automatically mirror all data in real time. In case of damage to these sites, Dell is helping JPPSS build a third site farther inland, 140 miles away in Lafayette, La. This site will funnel the other centers' data to a Dell PowerVault tape library for backup 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. "The new centralized infrastructure Dell has customized for us is designed to save priceless data in the event of an emergency and keep technology up and running for communicating critical information to students, parents and the community."

In addition to designing a hardware solution, Dell is helping JPPSS refine its disaster recovery policies and procedures and is training the IT staff to manage the three-site backup system. Members of the JPPSS staff will participate later this summer in full-scale disaster response simulations training conducted by the Dell staff.

"A key tenet of any good backup and recovery plan is redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, with more than one data center being ideal to account for the possibility of damage," said Karen Bruett, vice president of Dell's K-12 business. "Jefferson Parish Public School District's approach can serve as a national model for proactive disaster planning. Dell is proud to help Gulf Coast schools take one more worry off their lists in times of emergency."

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