University Learns How to Cut Backup Time in Half
University Uses Quantum Data De-Duplication Technology to Cut Backup Time in Half
SOLUTION OVERVIEW
- Quantum DXi3500 disk-based backup in the 1.2 TB configuration
- Quantum Scalar® i2000 tape library with six LTO-3 drives
- Quantum Scalar® i500 tape library with two LTO-3 drives
- Symantec NetBackup 5.0
- 200 Windows, UNIX Solaris and Linux servers
KEY BENEFITS
- Reduced disk space required for backup by 90%
- Cut time needed by backup by 50%
- Eliminated tape from short-term backup process (still uses for longer term retention and disaster recovery)
- Eliminated failed backup jobs
- Reduced administrative time and cost
University of St. Thomas
Established in 1885, St. Thomas is an independent Catholic liberal arts university with its main campus in St. Paul, Minnesota. For the first 90 years, the school was a four-year college with a primarily male student body. Over the last the three decades it has gone co-ed, become a university with 46 graduate programs, quadrupled its enrollment and opened three branch campuses.
The university has 30 people in its IT department to provide services to its 15,000 full-time students and 2,000 staff members. There are nearly 200 servers, a mix of Windows and UNIX, running more than sixty applications at the university's two data centers, one at the St. Paul campus, and the other across the river at the downtown Minneapolis campus. The Windows applications run on Dell and Sun Microsystems servers, and the Solaris and Linux applications run on Sun servers. St. Thomas uses a Xiotech SAN for both the Windows and Unix stacks, with additional Sun storage for Unix.
BACKUP NIGHTMARES
University of St. Thomas performs 20 TB full backups over the weekends, supplemented by daily 1 TB incremental backups. They had been using a Quantum Scalar i2000 enterprise tape library in St. Paul and a small autoloader in Minneapolis. As the quantity of stored data continued to rise, St. Thomas started using a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup. This proved to be only a temporary solution.
"We were using raw SAN disk for disk-to-disk staging," said Laura Thomas, server administrator for the University of St. Thomas. "It had become increasingly slow as it got more fragmented and it wouldn't clean itself very well."
Eventually it got to the point where backups started at 6:00 or 7:00 in the evening and would still be running at the start of the next business day. Even worse were the frequent failures.
"Every night, I'd log into the system from home to make sure I had enough tape and enough space cleared on the SAN so the backups would run," said Thomas. "It was a constant juggling act. We needed to do something to shorten our backup windows and make everything more reliable and more robust, so we began looking for solutions with more throughput and capacity."
SElecting A Solution
This led the university to start looking at options for upgrading its backup systems. "Since we already had a Quantum library and we loved it, we were looking to replace it with a similar library," said Thomas.
The university considered three vendors: Quantum, Spectra Logic and Sun. St. Thomas has a large Sun presence in the data center, but decided against using Sun's StorageTek backup hardware because of its high price tag. Thomas said they ruled out Spectra Logic's tape libraries because they seemed more fragile and harder to work with than the Quantum Scalar® library they had been using. In addition, the Spectra Logic solution called for staging the storage on the Xiotech SAN, something the university had already been doing with limited success. That led them to purchasing a solution from Quantum. Although Thomas began this project comparing tape libraries, she liked the disk and tape solution Quantum offered, which would help her increase performance and shorten her backup windows.
"We were very happy with our previous experience with the Quantum libraries, they were super reliable and the support on them was awesome," said Thomas. "The Quantum DXi™ appliance was really interesting the way it worked like a virtual tape library, and didn't require special backup software or load agents anywhere; it just acts like a tape library, runs like a library, and works great that way."
University of St. Thomas purchased a 1.2 TB Quantum DXi3500 disk backup and remote replication appliance with data de-duplication technology and a Quantum Scalar i2000 tape library with six LTO-3 drives for the St. Paul campus, and a Quantum Scalar i500 tape library with two LTO-3 drives for the Minneapolis campus. A local technician met the delivery truck, helped unload the hardware and set it up. Installation of the Quantum equipment was easy – with all three systems going live in less than one day.
"From the moment we set up the DXi3500 and streamed backups to it, was under one hour," said Thomas. "I was shocked at how fast and easy it was."
GETTING A GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP
The DXi appliance is connected to the same Fibre Channel fabric that connects all the tape libraries and servers. Disk backup is used for short term storage, typically two weeks or less, before it is streamed to tape and sent to offsite storage. Given the additional capacity of the DXi system provided by the data-de-duplication feature, the university runs additional servers to it and then duplicates from the DXi3500 to tape. Since the daily incrementals run around 1 TB, and the DXi3500 has 1.2 TB capacity, the University of St. Thomas uses the built-in data de-duplication technology.
"Currently, we are seeing about 10:1 on our data de-duplication ratio but I expect to see that improve as I get more data going to the DXi3500," said Thomas.
She streams the data from a number of the slower performing servers to backup the DXi appliance over a single connection which has greatly reduced the time needed for the backup. The daily backup windows have been cut down from 10 hours to just five. Just as important has been the reliability and ease of administration.
"I don't get any more phone calls in the middle of the night telling me that we are out of tape, or that our backups failed," she said. "I don't think about backups anymore because the DXi3500 with its data de-duplication has eliminated these thoughts from my mind." When asked about future plans for the Quantum solution, Thomas says she would like to get a DXi5500 for the larger St. Paul data center; and move the DXi3500 to the Minneapolis data center. She would like to run more backups to the DXi-Series in general and have fewer backups to tape.
"Our data grows on average about 30 percent a year, so I'd like to use Quantum's DXi-Series to help buffer the growth versus the tape libraries," said Thomas. "I'd also use it to replicate our enterprise data, ERP data, from St. Paul direct to Minneapolis using the replication feature between the two DXi systems."
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