Case Study: The Open University protects MK:Smart data and achieves sub-10-minute VM recovery with Arcserve UDP

The Open University protects the Milton Keynes MK:Smart research initiative with Arcserve UDP

The Open University led the three‑year MK:Smart initiative to support sustainable economic growth in Milton Keynes by building the MK Data Hub — a platform that ingests multiple terabytes of city data (energy, transport, weather, pollution, social and economic feeds) stored across diverse systems and a SAN. The team needed a scalable, heterogeneous backup and recovery solution that could protect many data stores (MySQL, Progress, MS SQL, file stores, Exchange, AD) and ensure historical data remained available for trend analysis.

They deployed Arcserve Unified Data Protection to safeguard 12 virtual and 6 physical servers, after a proof of concept showing ~40% compression and ~30% deduplication. Full weekly backups complete in under 30 minutes, incremental backups run multiple times daily in under 10 minutes, and virtual machines can be recovered across the SAN in less than 10 minutes. Backups are replicated to an offsite DR location, management takes under 10 minutes a day, and the solution has preserved data availability and protected the initiative’s reputation.

Open University

Paul Alexander

Technical Operations Lead