Scottish Uni calls on Legato for back-up

Strathclyde University has turned to Legato after a run of difficulties with back-up software.

The Scottish seat of higher learning has 20 computing facilities spread across its campus and the software will be used for the back-up and protection of students' work, among other things.

Vincent Anglim, computing officer at the university's Central Computing department, said: "We've tried a lot of back-up solutions, going through most of the software you can have but we've had problems with all of them."

He said the Legato option is proving reliable and easy to use.

However, the move is not without controversy. Strathclyde University is a well-known user of hardware and software from Sun Microsystems, which prefers to partner with Veritas for storage software management.

Legato is now a division of storage specialist EMC and while EMC hardware is often found alongside Sun servers, it is not thought the university is a big EMC shop.

Anglim said that the university's MIS department is heavily Sun-oriented but the academic computing facilities are increasingly Intel-based. Current Intel-based servers from Sun are a relatively new offering and are at the lower end of the vendor's product line up.

Strathclyde University was supported in its decision to take the Legato and EMC's NetWorker route by integrator TriSys.

The Legato software is used with DLT700 libraries and three drives attached to servers running Microsoft Windows 2003 Server operating system.

The value of the Legato deal has not been disclosed.