Department of Communications, Energy and Natural

Resources choose Origina to implement a SAN and Enterprise

Backup Solution

Introduction:

At the beginning of 2004 the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources came out to tender with a requirement for a Centralised Storage and Back-Up solution to meet their growing data storage needs.

The department needed to install a new backup solution which offered not only sufficient storage capacity on all systems in the short term, but also resilience and disaster recovery, as well as investment protection to support the growth of their environment. The solution needed to have the necessary flexibility and scalability to be able to move forward with the department as its backup requirement developed in the future.

The Solution:

The solution proposed by Origina was a Storage Area Network (SAN) and an enterprise backup solution that provides resilience and disaster recovery for both the proposed SAN, for smaller SANs, and Direct Attached Storage (DAS) already in use in the organisation.

This was achieved by a combination of IBM hardware and IBM software designed to give the department centralised control of their data as well as the backup and recovery processes. The solution was based on an IBM FAStT700 Storage Server 5TB Disk, IBM/McData 24 Port Switches, an IBM 3583 Tape Library and IBM xSeries Servers. The data management / back-up solution was composed IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and CommVault Galaxy for the Microsoft Exchange environment.

The Business Benefits:

The main benefit of the solution is that it brings the Department a stable & supported environment that is highly flexible and tailored (e.g. LAN & SAN back-up) as well as being secure and managed. This environment provides a reduced back-up window, proven recovery procedures, improved asset utilisation and a highly scalable environment. Another benefit is the reduced cost of managing an entire IT environment, both on the maintenance costs, as well as the operational costs.

Tomas O'Leary, Managing Director of Origina said, "The department had a diverse user base, both geographically and in terms of their business needs. Backups meant managing a larger amount of data, smaller back-up windows, hot backups, more servers and more server logs. There were a huge number of specialised software packages in use across the organisation, creating a complex computing environment. Their key requirements were to increase the effectiveness of their IT systems infrastructure to provide for future growth in the organisation, while reducing the cost of managing their current technology environment".
 
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