Case Study: Children’s Defense Fund achieves rapid recovery and dramatically faster backups with the Arcserve UDP Appliance

Children’s Defense Fund Protects Business Continuity with the Arcserve UDP Appliance

The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) is a 130‑employee nonprofit that advocates for vulnerable children and depends on Raiser’s Edge donor software and Exchange to manage fundraising and communications. Its tape‑only backup process was slow and laborious, leaving 10 TB of data across seven physical servers (three VMware hosts running 15 VMs plus four servers for domain controller, SQL, Raiser’s Edge and backup) at risk of prolonged downtime and data loss.

CDF implemented the Arcserve UDP Appliance — a plug‑and‑play, appliance‑based data protection solution that was live in about 30 minutes. Full backups fell from 2.5 days on tape to roughly six hours, incremental backups often complete in seconds, and a failed mission‑critical server was restored in under an hour, reducing backup windows, cutting IT labor and ensuring rapid business continuity.

Children’s Defense Fund

John Robinson

CDF Network Administrator