West Yorkshire’s Fire and Rescue Authority (WYF&R) has been judged by the Audit Commission, in the Fire Service Modernisation Report 2004, as one of the most forward-thinking in the country. It is a ranking shared only with London and Staffordshire. The Authority serves a population of more than two million spread over an area of almost 800 square miles. Fire cover is provided 24-hours per day, every day of the year.
All 999 calls are received by a central control room at HQ in Birkenshaw. Appliances can then be mobilised from 48 fire stations. Each front-line fire engine is equipped with state-of-the-art rescue equipment and some are geared up for heavy rescue. There is also a fleet of specialist back-up appliances. The Authority’s fire-fighters stand trained and ready to cope with a whole range of emergencies, not just fire. These include road, rail or air crashes, floods, chemical spills and even terrorist attack.
BACKGROUND
Following consultancy with SICL on storage and backup strategy WYF&R ordered a 2TB compressed Asigra vault at the Headquarters Site (HQ) linked to 5 District Offices backing up clustered Netware servers. WYF&R’s remote sites store live information for approximately 30 weeks; however HQ stores all data permanently. There were numerous applications requiring back up including Novell, Microsoft and UNIX. This was achievable by backing up ‘Delta` changes only. WYF&R progressed the project by a full demonstration of backup, disaster and restore before purchase. A major factor was the need to incorporate the simplicity of the backup enabling the Helpdesk to restore staff data should there be a need.
APPROACH
SICL carried out the installation and configuration of the HQ vault, training WYF&R IT staff on support and disaster recovery, which included the configuration and testing of backup policies. SICL also provided installation and configuration of one district office, allowing WYF&R’s IT staff to handle the remaining installations at District Offices with remote support.
RESULTS
SICL continues to provide support and assistance to WYF&R’s IT department, that has experienced a decrease in the time taken to complete all backups in addition to improving security as all data is fully encrypted. WYF&R achieved its project aims: a central repository for all data plus offsite backup for disaster recovery.