City of Dothan Gets “rock-solid dependable” Backup Solution For System i With LaserVault UBD
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Challenges
The City of Dothan, Alabama, faced numerous challenges with using tape media to backup their 850 gig of data daily. According to Jeff Young, IT Specialist with the City of Dothan,
“We needed to move our backup system away from our main data center to an off-site location but we were physically putting tapes into our tape drive daily.”
In addition to the manual process of loading the tape, they then had to have someone physically take the tape to an off-site location.
Solution
Although LaserVault offered a new technology that they were first unfamiliar with, the other solutions they found required significant hardware changes in addition to software and procedural changes. States Jeff,
“UBD allowed us to make very minimal hardware and procedural changes to our backup process. We purchased and set up two UBD devices (one attached to our primary system and one attached to our backup system) which allows us to connect to our primary UBD device and point it to our backup UBD device to restore a file, library, etc. directly to our primary system quickly and efficiently.
“Our primary System i is replicated daily to our high availability back up System i which is then backed up using the UBD device to a SAN. UBD allowed us to backup to the SAN eliminating the need for physical tapes, allowing us to move our backup system to a safe off-site location.
“Additionally, with UBD the City has seen a 30 to 40% improvement in their backup windows with about a 4 to 1 compression ratio for space improvement.”
Summary
“Eliminating the need to physically put a tape in a tape drive allowed us to move our high availability back up system to an off-site location. This greatly improved our backup position in case of a disaster.
“So far it has done exactly what it is supposed to do. It has allowed us to move our backup system off-site and get away from physical tapes. It also improves our ability to restore data from one system to the other one.
“A backup solution needs to be rock solid dependable and just work. UBD has exceeded that expectation already.”
