ORION is confident that several Ontario colleges and universities will soon sign on to its new backup storage service, the first dedicated exclusively to research and education institutions in Canada.

The new service was launched recently at the Ontario Universities Computing Conference. The service is expected to bring significant benefits and efficiencies to universities, colleges and other research and education facilities across Ontario.

As institutions seek to find ways of doing more with fewer resources, the more routine requirements, such as backup storage, offer excellent opportunities for more efficient approaches. Access to a safe and secure, off-site backup storage solution is an increasingly important consideration for risk management and disaster recovery strategies.

"This is very significant to Ontario's postsecondary institutions and research-intensive facilities because it allows them to use ORION to back up and store multiple terabytes of critical data in a robust and highly secure environment," says ORION President and CEO, Phil Baker. "The resulting benefits and efficiencies will be quite substantial."

Offered in partnership with Toronto-based Storagepipe Solutions Inc., the ORION Backup Storage Service recently wrapped up a successful testing stage involving Queen's and York Universities, evaluating off-site backup storage in typical production conditions. The service is now available to all ORION institutions, including colleges, school boards, teaching hospitals and research facilities across the province.

"CIOs and network managers say that the burden of managing backup storage represents a significant resource and operational pressure," says ORION Technology Innovation Leader, Blair Brenot, who helped develop the service in consultation with ORION user institutions Brenot.

"They are under pressure to support more productive deployment of available resources. Core IT activities such as data backup and storage account for an increasingly disproportionate share of these scarce resources which can be applied to other priorities," says Brenot. "It makes a lot sense for institutions to leverage ORION's capabilities, where speed and the ability to store and retrieve very large and critical data is absolutely vital," he says.

The amount of data now being created, shared and stored at postsecondary and other institutions is growing exponentially, driven by increasing dependence on digital documentation and multimedia files for learning and research in all disciplines.

Access to a shared service also introduces a green information technology solution by reducing an institution's need to maintain costly and less efficient storage facilities.

The new service follows an early study commissioned by 16 Ontario universities, which suggested colleges and universities could achieve significant efficiencies by establishing a shared, secure online data storage service over ORION.

For more information on the new service, visit www.orion.on.ca/backup.