Vinchin Provides Robust Backup Solution to Stand by the University of Évora to against COVID-19

Right now, we are backing up our Web-Servers to support the investigation of the Use of Saliva for Diagnosis and Monitoring the SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). We are using oVirt to support the project folding@home with computation resources for calculations for simulating proteins and SARS-CoV-2. With Vinchin Backup & Recovery, the security of our research data is guaranteed. It's much reassuring and helpful for us to work at the frontline of the fight against COVID-19.

Carlos Limpinho, Assistant Director of IT Infrastructure & Service

University of Évora

Business Challenge

The University of Évora (Universidade de Évora) is a public university in Portugal. It is the second oldest university in the country, established in 1559 and located in Évora, a city and a municipality in Portugal. Évora is a UNESCO World Heritage site, there are many monuments dating from various historical periods, including a Roman Temple, it is also a member of the Most Ancient European Towns Network. The University of Évora is a center for the creation, transmission and diffusion of culture, science and technology, which, through the articulation of study, teaching and research, is integrated into the life of society.

As an ancient university in the system of public higher education in Portugal, the University of Évora aims to transmit knowledge to the community with a view to innovation and business competitiveness, as well as the modernization of public services and the social and cultural development of the entire communities. Besides the normal academic research and education, such that significant research takes place on the campus of the University of Évora. When the COVID-19 outbreak emerged, the scientific group of the university efforts to assist researchers around the world in taking up the global fight against COVID-19.

“This oVirt infrastructure that I am trying to make backups is a Huawei blade system and is used to support the project Folding@home with computation resources for calculations for simulating proteins and SARS-CoV-2. Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. And our university is honored to be one of the volunteers.” Says Carlos, Assistant Director of IT Infrastructure & Service at the University of Évora.

“The digitalized processes with highly flexible data organization are a key prerequisite for the research, and our job is to ensure critical components supporting these projects are backed up and available all the time, including research systems and data. If they're not available, all of the processes could be impacted. We were therefore looking for a powerful backup solution that would reliably protect the research's digital processes.” Says Carlos.

Vinchin Solution

After evaluating different solution variants, Carlos decided to use Vinchin Backup & Recovery, “The overall package convinced us from the very beginning. Vinchin combines in one solution all the functions we need for the simple and reliable backup and recovery of our workloads. It not only allows us to maximize the data availability of our entire IT infrastructure, it also gives us very good budget support because what we are doing is a public benefit project. As it's hard for everyone to push the work progress in the age of COVID-19, doing public welfare project makes us even more stretched financially. However, Vinchin brings their products to give the greatest support to our research, even at the expense of their own interests. We do appreciate it!” Says Carlos.

As a data protection vendor, Vinchin is the first one being recognized by oVirt and officially listed on the oVirt community. That means Vinchin Backup & Recovery is more stable and reliable for oVirt backup and recovery than others. “We knew about Vinchin from the oVirt community, it was the first reason we decided to go with Vinchin. After then, we had a detailed test of it and we found it’s a really easy to use, blazing-fast backup and recovery solutions, and reliability along with first-class technical support place it is head and shoulders above the competition. With Vinchin’s advanced backup and disaster recovery technology, we now have a central solution to protect our digital processes, and to bring the availability of all data to a higher level.” Says Carlos.

In conversation with Carlos, he proposed a functional requirement that is important to the research process - one more node backup. "Adding one more node backup can help distribute all data and backup them to different repositories simultaneously, Vinchin Backup & Recovery allows us to be able to distribute all research data during backup to faster the data protection process and reduce consumption of our IT resources. The technical support provided by Vinchin is first class. They are very responsive, knowledgeable, and go the extra mile to ensure our requirements are dealt with and resolved in the shortest possible time, no matter presale or after-sale support requests."

Result

“With Vinchin Backup & Recovery, data protection is simple, flexible, and reliable. One solution backs up all data, perfect! Wherever we are, we can easily access to the single web console through browser to monitor, back up and recover any workload when necessary, that gives our IT team visibility and insight into the entire process, and be able to resolve issues proactively before they escalate into problems so we can focus on fighting against COVID-19.” Says Carlos. Vinchin is proud of contributing our wisdom and strength against COVID-19, even if stand behind the people on the firing line, we wish our data protection technology can not only protect virtual data but also the real world.