GridStore
Offsite backup, fast recovery and information management for your MAT and school data.
GridStore Upgrade to Enterprise Server Edition (ESE)
Following on from the announcement on Tuesday 14th July relating to the free upgrade of GridStore, we’ve now successfully migrated all of your data over to Redstor and we’re ready to upgrade the platform to the Redstor ESE product!
Platform Upgrade
The upgrade will commence on Monday 21st September and we expect this to take approximately 60 days to complete. The upgrade is fully automated, it should not require any technical interaction from your school and there will be no disruption to your GridStore service. Schools will be grouped by their home local authority and upgraded alphabetically (A-Z).
Potential Technical Upgrade Challenges
As mentioned above, we are not anticipating any issues with the upgrade but there are 2 potential technical challenges to make you are of. They are:
1. There are some agent settings on SE that are not compatible with ESE and if your school is one of the few affected by any of these, we have raised a case for you on the LGfL Support Site to advise you of what settings need to be changed and how to do it. To prevent any disruption to your service, we will not upgrade your school until the required settings have been applied.
2. On very rare occasions, the agent upgrade can fail. If this does happen and we require your assistance in reinstalling, we will raise a case for your school on the LGfL Support Site and support you in reinstalling the agent.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Does my school need to do anything to prepare for the agent upgrade?
No! The process is fully automated and should not require any technical interaction from your school.
Have LGfL and Redstor fully tested the upgrade procedure?
Yes! Redstor have successfully upgraded agents from SE to ESE on multiple occasions so you can be assured that the process has been rigorously tested and is robust. LGfL have also upgraded their agents to ensure that the upgrade works in our environment so you can have confidence that the upgrade process works.
Will I still have access to my historical backups while the upgrade is performed?
Yes! While the upgrade is being performed, you will still be able to access your historical backups and perform restores.
Will my backups continue to run while the upgrade is performed?
Yes! Your backups will continue during the upgrade so there is no need to alter your backup schedule.
How long will the agent upgrade take on my server?
The agent upgrade will take approximately 2 hours to complete.
How will I know that the upgrade has successfully completed?
Once the agent has been upgraded, you will notice that the agent is now Redstor ESE when you login.
Once the upgrade has completed, will my school have access to all of the new features?
Yes! You will be able to use all of the new features, such as backing up your O365 / Google data directly and backing up and restoring full physical / virtual servers.
My school has one of the incompatible settings, what should I do?
Fear not! We will not upgrade your agent until you have updated the required settings and your school will continue to use the SE agent. We have raised a case for your school on the LGfL Support Site and provided you with instructions about how to change the settings.
My server is still running Server 2003 / 2008, will this affect my backups and restores?
Again, fear not! We will not upgrade your agent until you have updated your servers operating system to a minimum of Server 2008R2 and your school will continue to use the SE agent.
What happens if the upgrade fails?
On rare occasions, the agent upgrade may fail. If this should unfortunately happen to your school, we will instantly raise a case for you on the LGfL Support Site and provide you with support for upgrading the agent manually on your server.
If the upgrade fails, will my backups continue to run?
No! Therefore, it is imperative that we both move quick as we possibly can to upgrade the agent manually on your server.
Has the migration of the backup data to Redstor from LGfL data centres been completed?
Yes! This was successfully completed over the summer period and GridStore is now running fully on Redstor servers. You will need to update your privacy policy and list Redstor as a sub-processor for GridStore. Redstor’s data centres are fully resilient and are based in the UK.
My school is part of a Federation / MAT and we manage multiple servers, how do I request console access to view all of the backups across all of my servers?
Simple! Please log a case on the LGfL Support Site and we will provide you with an account and support to access the console.
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