Backup and Recovery
Software Developer Reduces Backup/Recovery Window by 65%
Company Background
Acme Company is a $1 billion per year manufacturer of Windows-based software whose over 4,000 employees develop applications for medium to large enterprises. Acme Company's customers come from such industries as manufacturing, utilities, civil engineering, and media and entertainment.
IT Environment
Acme Company has over 31 terabytes of storage capacity within its direct-attached server farm, which has a total of 125 Windows 2000/2003 file servers. In addition, the company recently purchased a two terabyte NAS appliance that utilizes ATA-based disk storage in an attempt to reduce the cost of acquiring and deploying storage for user and application data.
The Problem
Acme Company is looking for a solution to shrink their backup and recovery window. Currently, the IT Department backs up all the online data on their direct-attached storage. Even though they believe that a portion of their data rarely changes and does not need a full-system backup, they have no way of identifying inactive data or a clean method of reorganizing it. Also, the engineers have insisted that their data remain online to avoid disrupting their productivity. They often need to access legacy data for a new project, incremental release, or support activities associated with the development of their software. The IT administrators are doing incremental backups nightly and full-system backups are done on a weekly basis. The full-system backups are taking 18 hours to complete and given current data growth rates, Acme Company is concerned about the ever-increasing length of their backup and recovery window.
ARKIVIO Solution
Acme Company is looking for a solution that will reduce their backup and recovery window without impacting end user productivity. First, the ARKIVIO® auto-stor software scans all the direct-attached storage volumes across the network and their contents without requiring installation of server agents. The IT administrators are able to determine total available and utilized capacity, and they determine 65 percent of end user data has not been modified within last 180 days. The administrators then deploy the ARKIVIO® auto-stor Policy Automation Engine (PAE) and push install Remote Server Assistants for the remote file servers. Since the Arkivio solution has already identified which servers hold the in-active data, the ARKIVIO PAE is able to automatically migrate the low-value data from the file servers to the low-cost NAS volumes. The data migration is completely transparent to the engineers and their applications. If they need to access the migrated files again, ARKIVIO® auto-stor automatically and immediately recalls the files to their original location and re-classifies these files as high-value. Now all the administrators need to do is change the backup policies on their servers. From that point forward ARKIVIO® auto-stor automatically directs data to the appropriate storage device optimizing the company's backup and recovery window.
The Result
The ARKIVIO® auto-stor solution automates the migration of low-value data from primary storage to secondary storage, enabling this Software Developer to run nightly incremental and weekly full-system backups on only the most active/valuable data. This creates significant operational efficiencies since the IT administrators do not have to manually examine each file, its owner, project, creation date and last access time. Additionally, this reduces the full backup window by as much as 65 percent - or from 18 hours to 10 hours and ensures that following an outage Acme Company is able quickly recovery their most critical files. Acme Company will also benefit from deferred tape procurement purchases and increased utilization of their lower-cost NAS storage.
