SafeData, LLC, has announced that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has selected SafeData/DR for its data recovery needs.

With more than 530 individuals providing leadership and service to public school districts and schools through the state, the NC DPI serves 100 counties and 15 cities all running IBM's iSeries platform and connected to DPI in various forms.

"With many mission-critical systems, including the state's student information system, human resource management system, payroll and financial management applications hosted on NC DPI's iSeries servers, protection and accessibility are key issues for the agency," said Tod Kisner, chief executive officer for Strategic Systems, a SafeData partner responsible for the NC DPI account. "The new CIO, a World Trade Center survivor, made one of his first initiatives to create a disaster recovery plan for the agency."

"With nine separate environments that are all backed up differently, we incurred significant media costs and were required to manually switch back and forth between the systems," explained Jeff Merritt, IT operations manager for the agency. "Using SafeData/DR, we expect to save about $10,000 a year alone in media expenses, but this is an added bonus to the disaster recovery benefits we will reap from the solution. We selected SafeData/DR because it was online and guaranteed that we would be up and running in less than 10 hours if we had a system failure. This guarantee was not available with the other options we evaluated."

Merritt continued, "SafeData and Strategic Systems have been very accommodating to both our technology and financial needs. They provided us a 30-day free trial, which blew us away and it has been evident that they are truly dedicated to ensuring our success with SafeData/DR."

SafeData/DR is a lower-cost alternative to data replication for companies with a recovery time objective of 10 hours or less. Leveraging the latest in electronic vaulting technologies, SafeData's service includes disk-to-disk backup and restoration capabilities. Its vaulting solution eliminates the potential for lost, damaged or obsolete tapes. It also offers anytime, anywhere secure access to files via a standard web browser. Furthermore, SafeData/DR's restoration capabilities enable clients to use their data whenever they need it.

About Strategic Systems USA

As a value-added systems integrator, Strategic Systems USA offers the best of an ever-changing market to solve the toughest data problems. Since it was founded in 1993, Strategic Systems has been providing businesses with workable technology solutions, including high availability and disaster recovery for IBM midrange systems. The Company is headquartered in Holly Springs, N.C. and has four remote office locations throughout the U.S. For more information on Strategic Systems, visit Strategic Systems.

About SafeData, LLC

SafeData, LLC is a technology company focused on helping businesses protect their data, minimize downtime and recover and restore data quickly. Offering Business Continuity Hosting Services via its data centers, SafeData provides cost-effective, subscription-based data protection services to support and protect businesses during a man-made or natural disaster, a technology failure, a power or utility outage or routine maintenance. SafeData's suite of high availability and disaster recovery offerings allows companies to choose the solution that matches their specific needs. Some of SafeData's clients include: The Calvin Klein division of Warnaco, Nypro, Inc., Ocean State Job Lot, Quaker Fabric Corporation, Symmons Industries and Wachovia. Founded in 2005, SafeData is headquartered in Warwick, R.I. For more information on SafeData, visit SafeData.