South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue brigade reduces downtime

South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue brigade reduces downtime and enhances efficiency with Yosemite

South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue is a metropolitan fire brigade, which functions under the control of South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Authority. Its primary role its to help the community of South Yorkshire in the prevention and eradication of fires and the protection of the public within its jurisdiction. It covers the county area of the South Yorkshire region, encompassing the four districts of Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.

IT is mission critical to the fire

service and it underpins all the work of the employees working within the brigade. An important aspect of the Yorkshire based emergency service is its ability to use data and information within its IT systems to deliver an effective service. As a result, it is important that the fire service’s data is protected so that if data is lost or corrupted, or a server goes down, the information can be recovered in order to minimise downtime for the 300 strong staff.

At South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue, there is wide variety of disparate data involved. For instance, the system contains all information that is within Microsoft Office, important photographs that have been taken of incidents, marketing and PR material, payroll/HR systems and recruitment databases. The IT systems also contain important information for its core, front line staff – its team of firefighters. For them, key documents that are all kept on the IT systems include health and safety manuals and procedures and dossiers on training.

In 2004, the brigade trialled Yosemite software as a new back up solution for its large scale migration from NT servers to Microsoft 2000 and Microsoft 2003 servers. The organisation needed back up software that was compatible with the new MS SQL server infrastructure. Local Yorkshire based IT systems integrator, Softassure, was selected as the IT integrator for the back up project as they provide a strong level of service and expertise. A further reason it chose Softassure is due to the fact the company is based in the Sheffield region so its consultants are available 24/7 to come in and help the IT department at the fire service as required.

With Softassure's assistance, the South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service implemented Yosemite Tapeware version 7 as stage one of its project. It then followed it up a year later by installing the next version of the solution - Yosemite Backup 8.5. Yosemite now provides backup for all data at central headquarters in Sheffield supporting over 300 users.

The public sector organisation implemented the solution with one master server so it could do the whole back up from one server and a client license for each one of the servers being protected. The benefit for the organisation's IT department is that all the jobs are created on one server and as a result it can back up different tapes in different zones from one single source.