CUSTOMER PROFILE
COMPANY: Financial Services Co.
INDUSTRY: Financial/Banking
ISSUES
- Risks to data created by having the human factor involved in the backup process
- Physical tape backups too slow
- Too many individuals involved in the backup process
- Limits with tape to running only 1 backup at a time
KEY SOLUTION
LaserVault ViTL Virtual Tape Library Emulation Solution
ViTL BENEFITS
- Backup speeds cut in half, even with offsite replication
- Backups automatically encrypted
- Automated backup replication to offsite location
- Easy implementation with no code changes required
CHALLENGES
Using stand-alone physical tape for their IBM i backup and recovery was presenting numerous challenges for this financial services company. They needed a solution they could implement quickly without disruption to their operations.
SOLUTION
After looking at Cybernetics, the company chose LaserVault ViTL to replace their physical tape backups.
ViTL is a virtual tape and tape library solution designed for use with IBM Power Systems to speed-up and simplify the backup and recovery process, while improving overall data protection.
The company’s IBM i Administrator says,
“Our primary reason for getting ViTL was to take away the human factor involved with physical media. Having to manage the physical media daily required 30 minutes a day from 2 to 3 different people.
“This has been reduced to less than 5 minutes a day for 1 person only.”
Other decision factors included: faster backups, the ability to have multiple concurrent backups running, plus the ability to implement a tapeless solution quickly without any code changes to their nightly cycle. Additionally, ViTL includes a feature to enable deduplication, and adding additional storage is easy.
“We use ViTL daily to backup pre and post processing of our nightly cycles. It is our primary resource for data recovery, as backups are replicated to an offsite device.”
SUMMARY
“ViTL is working great,” says the administrator. “We have had zero issues since day 1 of implementation. Our backup speeds have been cut in half, even with the offsite replication.
“We all know physically transferring tapes has its own risk, and that risk has been removed with the ability to replicate offsite.
“Support for LaserVault is amazing! The technicians that came on site, ensured that our needs on this were fully met and that we fully understood how the system worked. Any questions that I have now are quickly answered when I email or call for support.
“Other companies in the financial industry could benefit by using ViTL to reduce backup and restore times, which allows for a shorter downtime window when the system has to be in a restricted state. Plus encrypting backups is easy, as is the ability to send those backups to an offsite location.
“The ViTL tapeless solution has truly made my job easier. It has given me more confidence in our full system recovery ability – but at the same time I hope it is never needed.”
