Guelph Hydro Electric Systems, Inc

Escalating Tape Storage Costs For iSeries Leads Guelph Hydro To Switch To UBD Tapeless Backup

CUSTOMER PROFILE

COMPANY
Guelph Hydro Electric Systems, Inc.
Guelph, Ontario Canada

INDUSTRY
Utility Provider

ISSUES
  • Tape costs escalating
  • Manual tape use requires too much time & oversight
  • Physically shipping tapes to off-site vendor eats up labor hours
  • Tape storage vendor costs increasing
  • Getting tapes back from off-site takes too long

KEY SOLUTION
LaserVault UBD Universal Backup Device

UBD BENEFITS
  • Cost savings realized by eliminating tape and use of tape storage vendor
  • Automatic backups reduces manual processes
  • Fast recovery of specific files or IFS
  • Works great with BRMS
  • Backup windows have been reduced 30%

Challenges

For their iSeries V.7.1, Guelph Hydro Electric Systems used physical tape for their daily backups, incremental backups, and weekly full system saves of 1.6TB. The manually-intensive process included shipping the tapes to an off-site storage facility.

In addition, rising tape media costs were compounded by higher prices from their storage vendor. With their backups physically located off-site, they faced long delays when they needed to restore their data.

Solution

According to Raymond Schade, Network Administrator at Guelph Hydro, their goal was to get away from using physical tape.

“We were looking for savings from no longer having to purchase tape. In addition, we no longer have to pay for tape storage and shipping tapes to and from the vendor, where the costs kept escalating.
 
“Using UBD to recover a particular file or IFS is extremely fast. Our backup windows have been reduced 30% over using tape.”

Summary

Schade explains,

“We backup BRMS directly to UBD. We created a CL to search BRMS for the earliest expired tape for the desired class and to issue the UBD command to mount this volume. Basically in the backup control group we inserted as the initial step an *EXIT to call our CL program. From that point, BRMS runs normally.
 
“When we first considered UBD, we had to wrap our heads around getting away from physical tape. In the end, it has worked out great for us.”

 


 

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