Gerry Weaver, CIO, Indiana Office of Technology

Net Gain

With the shot clock ticking, Indiana's Office of Technology puts a full-court press on revamping backup

On his first day in office in 2004, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels formed the Indiana Office of Technology (IOT) and charged the organization with a tall order: consolidating the state's IT infrastructure-including email, file services, authentication, and Microsoft Active Directory-while providing better service and trimming costs.

When Gerry Weaver was appointed as IOT's CTO, he understood the challenge ahead. Weaver's assessment of the Hoosier state's IT infrastructure boiled down in punchy midwestern brevity to one word: "dismal."

Much like Indiana's renowned basketball teams, IOT put on the fast break and went to work. Microsoft Exchange backup was slashed from more than 24 hours to 10 to 14 hours. Exchange restore was cut from eight hours to 90 minutes. File server backup was reduced from more than 30 hours to eight hours, and full backup performed on weekends was finished on Saturday as opposed to Monday.

These numbers are even more impressive considering the speed at which the project went forward in accordance with the governor's "sooner rather than later" mandate. With a combination of cutting-edge technology and shrewd project-management skills, IOT fulfilled pressing, immediate requirements while creating a flexible infrastructure to meet future demands.

Personal foul: Lost data

The initial phase of the consolidation involved upgrading data protection in the Indianapolis data center. The state has eight servers running Microsoft Exchange Server, and more than 38,000 mailboxes for employees. Working in conjunction with Moongate Technologies, an Indianapolis-based storage consulting firm and a Symantec Platinum Partner, IOT determined the best way to safeguard the eight terabytes of email data was by backing it up to a virtual tape library using the NetBackup for Exchange Server Agent and then writing to tape.

"Moongate focused on understanding our business first, solving our business issues and finding creative solutions for them, and then on implementing them," says Weaver, who was recently promoted to CIO of IOT. "I don't know how many calls from other vendors I've had saying, 'Can I come in? I'll show you how I'll save you 30 percent.' The others just want to sell consulting hours, not work with us."

The state was all too familiar with the risks associated with storing data on servers and tape drives in remote offices. In the past, some of those offices had burned to the ground, destroying such valuable data such as correspondence from citizens. In other instances, the IT department had tried to restore remote data and found it couldn't. Since the remote offices lacked dedicated IT personnel for backup, the tapes were not always swapped out, and backup wasn't verified on a regular basis.