|
contents | business | |||||||
| Ipswich Borough Council Chooses the ExaGrid System ExaGrid Systems announces that Ipswich Borough Council has chosen the ExaGrid system to achieve faster backups, improve security of data and to save taxpayers' money in the future with built-in scalability. Ipswich BC is a regional centre for business, culture, entertainment and sport and has more than 130,000 residents. To support the Council's 70 IT applications, the council's IT department is responsible for an IT infrastructure that includes 130 servers across the IT and telephone network. These applications create vast quantities of data that needs to be backed up on a daily basis and stored in a secure environment. As the quantity of data grew, Ipswich BC found that its tape based backup systems were simply not able to cope with demand. In fact the load on the seven tape drives meant that a daily backup was taking 23.5 hours to complete. This meant that there was only a 30 minute window before the next backup was due to commence. The weekly backups would take all weekend. On many occasions the backups exceeded the available time window and had to be terminated. As a result the team at Ipswich BC knew they either needed to buy another tape drive or move to a new solution. With long backup and restore times, tape management issues causing problems on a daily basis and with what is practically an obsolete technology in situ, Ipswich BC decided to cope with future demand by adding a disk-based backup system. After a thorough selection process, Ipswich BC selected the ExaGrid system from three alternative offerings and is already beginning to see a remarkable ROI. By moving 27 terabytes of data backups to the ExaGrid system, Ipswich BC has reduced the tape based backups to 20 hours a day and will reduce them further as more backups are migrated across to the ExaGrid platform. ExaGrid's GRID computing software makes the system scalable, and when plugged into a switch, different sized configurations can be mixed and matched into a single GRID system with capacities of up to a 60TB full backup plus retention. When virtualized, they appear as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic. ExaGrid combines last backup compression along with data deduplication, which only stores changes from backup to backup instead of storing full file copies. This unique approach reduces the disk space required by a range of 10:1 to 50:1 or more. ExaGrid delivers extremely fast backup performance because data is written directly to disk, and data deduplication is performed post-process after the data is stored to reduce data. write your comments about the article :: © 2009 Computing News :: home page |