A milestone in data security preparedness was reached in March when EZ-Backup, the university's central data backup service, began maintaining an additional copy of Ithaca department backups at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. If Ithaca campus infrastructure is ever impaired, data backed up through the service will remain safe, said Paul Varnowski, manager of storage services at Cornell Information Technologies (CIT). Keeping data secure was the top recommendation made by the Disaster Recovery Planning Task Force, convened in 2006 by Polley McClure, vice president for information technologies, in response to questions from the board of trustees about safeguarding Cornell data.

Over 300 terabytes of compressed legacy data was copied to Weill before daily data copying could begin. Now more than 5 terabytes of new data is transmitted daily over the high-speed network connection between campuses.

Teams from Ithaca and New York collaborated to create the new system and a tape library at Weill. Keeping the project in-house and leveraging Cornell-owned equipment were more efficient and cost-effective than would have been possible using an outside vendor, CIT says.

There is no added cost to EZ-Backup users. For more information, e-mail ezbackup@cornell.edu or visit http://cit.cornell.edu/services/ezbackup.