Westmoreland County, PA Uses UBD To Cut iSeries Backup By 30%
CUSTOMER PROFILE
COMPANY
Westmoreland CountyGreenburg, Pennsylvania
INDUSTRY
City Government
ISSUES
- Shorten backup time frames
- Tape drive malfunctions
- Tape media cost
- Off-site tape storage and retrieval
KEY SOLUTION
LaserVault Universal Backup Device (UBD)
UBD BENEFITS
- Backup time cut by 30%
- Minimal tape usage/storage
- No Power 6 DASD space used
- UBD Appliance can be used at our DR site as a boot device and configured as a LTO tape device
Challenges
Michael Linardi, Manager of Systems Administration of Westmoreland County Information Systems, needed an IBM iSeries/Power 6 backup solution that would shorten their LTO1 and LTO4 daily, weekly and monthly tape backup time frames.
Solution
Michael compared Sphinx by Crossroads and UBD by LaserVault. He found each appliance connected to the Power 6 using Fibre Channel and appeared as an LTO tape drive. But Michael quickly discovered a key difference in the two solutions:
“The LaserVault UBD setup was definitely easier and took less time to configure. UBD auto-configured an IBM tape drive on our system and used IBM commands, which made their appliance ready for production with minimal CL modifications.”
Summary
Regarding the success they have experienced with UBD, Michael Linardi, Manager of Systems Administration states:
“I have been very pleased with the LaserVault UBD solution; it has cut our IFS (image files), nightly and weekend backup timeframes by 30%. We are also experiencing a 6 to 1 compression of the data on the UBD appliance.
“The appliance worked exactly the way it was explained to us and it emulates an IBM tape drive, which uses the normal save/restore commands. The restore process is fast, whether restoring a full library or just one object.
“In the near future we will be backing up the LaserVault Universal Backup Device (UBD) appliance to our ExaGrid disk backup with data deduplication system.”
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