Established in 1961, Westat is an employee-owned research corporation serving agencies of the U.S. Government, as well as businesses, foundations and state and local governments. In addition to capabilities as a leading statistical survey research organization, Westat has developed skills and experience in custom research and program evaluation studies across a broad range of subject areas.

Westat has been an ISE customer for the past 15 years, utilizing the versatile data storage capabilities of the EnterpriseBACKUP backup and media librarian tool. In a massive research facility like Westat, customers depend on a reliable product to quickly, easily and efficiently backup and restore their user data into an organized tape library. In a recent conversation with Operations Manager Troy Reynolds, we found just how massive that storage library is. Troy states that the library consists of in excess of 10,000 9 track tapes and 5,000 8mm tapes. Information about the tapes and their contents is stored in the online media database so he doesn’t mount a tape to view its contents.

"Never really has a problem". "Happy with the product" and is "very reliable".

Troy Reynolds
Operations Manager
Westat

The majority of Troy's operations consist of user requests for specific backups of their personal data. Troy has created a series of routines wrapped around EnterpriseBACKUP that respond to the user request and store the data on either 9-track or 8mm tape media. In addition, the data center runs about 10 weekly backups of system drives.

While system backups are kept for 14 months, user data backups are stored indefinitely, making for a massive accumulation of online data and offline physical media. EnterpriseBACKUP keeps track of tapes as well as their contents, allowing a simple directory command to provide the contents of a tape that may have been written many years previously.

Troy noted that he has almost never had to contact ISE tech support because the software "Never really has a problem". He loves the fact that he can always get a listing of files stored on a tape in the library from the online media library database. He is very "Happy with the product" and referred to it as "very reliable".