Royal & Sun Alliance choose Origina to implement a Centralised Tape

Backup Solution

Introduction:

Origina was brought on board by Royal & Sun Alliance Ireland following a strategic decision by the insurance company to streamline its IT systems infrastructure and provide for future growth in storage requirements.

As a result of this decision, a clear requirement arose for Royal & Sun Alliance to consolidate and upgrade its data management methods and as a result its systems infrastructure.

The Solution:

To fulfil Royal & Sun Alliance's requirements, Origina designed the necessary data management architecture using IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager Software (TSM) and IBM's Ultra scalable LTO Tape Library. TSM is a highly flexible solution, which provides enterprise wide back up capabilities for a customer's data whether this is across a local area network (LAN) or a storage area network (SAN) and IBM LTO technology provides a robust and scalable tape solution.

The Business Benefits:

The benefits of the new architecture include a reduced back-up window for the company's data, a centralised storage solution, and flexibility to support a variety of systems i.e. AS/400, AIX, Windows and other Open Systems.

Additionally the solution handles both mission-critical systems in a SAN environment and second line systems with local storage. The solution provides for an offsite and on site copy of all backed up data, cutting the time taken to retrieve information from the company's recovery systems.

Aidan Armstrong, Information Technology Support Manager, Royal & Sun Alliance, said: "As a result of the review, we required a solution that would manage, control and centralise the backup and recovery of all of our data, and yet be robust and scalable to cope with the demands of future growth across multiple platforms".

"The software involved also had to be able to manage data based on multiple hardware and software platforms, using many different applications. We were delighted that the solution designed by Origina closely matched all of our requirements, in terms of reducing costs, improving efficiency and accommodating future growth requirements," said Mr Armstrong.

The project is a highly significant win for Origina in the IBM software solutions area. Origina is one of IBM's top five software business partners in Ireland. Of the four IBM software brands, Origina are specialists in the design and implementation of solutions, using Tivoli, Lotus and Websphere products.

Tomás O'Leary, Managing Director of Origina, said: "This was an extremely complex project, which effectively required us to work with Royal & Sun Alliance to accommodate the strategic direction of its IT function. Our job was to design and implement a high-end backup and recovery solution that would fully satisfy the requirements of Royal & Sun Alliance".

Why choose Origina?

"We were delighted that the solution designed by Origina closely matched all of our requirements, in terms of reducing costs, improving efficiency and accommodating future growth requirements."
Aidan Armstrong
Information Technology Support Manager
Royal & Sun Alliance

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