Forest Park District 91 school board members unanimously approved the purchase of a new online data storage and retention service at a board of education meeting on Aug. 9.
Members approved spending $22,115 total on a Unitrends Recovery Backup Appliance, which transfers D91’s data nightly to a storage device; three-year technical support service; one-year subscription license for Unitrends Forever Cloud Retention service, which stores D91’s data off-site; and Unitrends Fast Upload On-Premise Solution from IT Savvy.
“If there were some disaster where we had to have data recovered, what this solution provides is that Unitrends would take all our backup data, put it on a disk and then send it to a server,” Ed Brophy, assistant superintendent of operations, said of the fast upload solution at the board meeting.
“If we didn’t have a solution, the amount of time it would take to recover all that data, we would be at their mercy in terms of schedule and availability. So we’re paying for an expedited service if we ever need it,” he added.
IT Savvy’s offer of Unitrends technology was the cheapest of the two proposals D91 received, the other coming from CDW Government, Brophy said. IT Savvy is also the vendor that supplied D91 teachers and personnel with new laptops in June.
D91 currently uses Unitrends’ technical support service, which is expiring this year, he said. He mentioned the district is only asking for a one-year subscription to the cloud retention service, since they don’t know how much data they’re going to use.
“We didn’t want to pay for multiple years if we didn’t need the amount of space,” Brophy said at the meeting.
During the September board meeting, Brophy said he is going to request to replace computer servers in the administrative building and at the Forest Park Middle School “for a slightly higher dollar amount.”
He said D91 has budgeted for both this request, as well as the upcoming request.
CONTACT: ntepper@wjinc.com
