Backup on the cheap

When book publisher CCH awarded a tender to integrator XSI, it just wanted to do one thing: run a successful backup.

CCH, a member of the international publishing group Wolters Kluwer, generates legal and financial publications and has branches in all the state capitals.

The firm had expanded in the way most businesses do - responding to needs as they arose and without a masterplan.

The result was a mixed environment with jukeboxes, directly attached storage, very cheap NAS and Sun SANs with an even split running Windows and Solaris.

Some performance requirements could have only been handled by direct to disk, and occasional projects had borrowed disk on servers or staff had added in their own file servers. “The storage amounts dramatically increase with these sorts of purchases,” says Alwyn Arthur, XSI's alliance manager, who oversaw the sale.

This heterogeneous environment made successful backups a difficult proposition and the result was a number of backups operated by several employees in different areas of the company. Despite the proliferation of devices, the storage was estimated to be no more than one terabyte in total.

The gradual accumulation of non-standardised equipment is common in SMBs and combined with an outdated backup system makes it impossible to finish a backup before new data starts being recorded.

A typical scenario is for the backup to start on Friday night and still be continuing on Monday morning when the servers come online again, says Arthur. The servers slow down so IT staff shut down the backups, leaving company information unprotected.

Sydney-based XSI has offices in all the state capitals and has been around for more than 20 years. It began in 1985 supplying disk and tape products from DEC, Data General and HP but now works with all the majors in data management, storage, disaster recovery and archiving. The company itself is part of the UXC group, an ASX300 company that includes other business solutions outfits as well as utility services and intellectual property ventures.

XSI began with a basic health check of CCH's equipment and processes. “Initially we try to do it within the existing environment without changing anything, you know a bit of tuning, get things happening like they should have been,” says Arthur.

CCH didn't want to spend any money on consolidating disk, but several items were evaluated to be below requirements and it became obvious that some devices needed to be replaced to improve the performance of backups and recoveries.

The integrator is vendor-neutral so it had to consider a smorgasbord of possibilities before selecting the appropriate combination.

“So we sat back and looked at the IT infrastructure, the number of staff, what they are trying to achieve, the number of remote sites, are they a Windows shop or a Unix shop, the competency level of their IT staff,” says Arthur.

There were also a number of regional offices which were doing their own backups on-site, but CCH wanted a centralised backup that was highly scalable.

During the implementation Arthur explained to the publisher how the regional sites could be backed up over the wire by only sending the change data to minimise the amount of data being uploaded and therefore the length of time each backup would take.

Some sites such as the office in Melbourne had so much data that to back it up by wire would have required large investments in LAN links, and so XSI decided to install a smaller tape library in Victoria that would be managed from Sydney.

Each solution is defined by the functionality offered for a product point, and the software component of the backup system was critical, says Arthur.

CommVault was chosen to manage the backup "predominantly because it was a Windows-focussed opportunity”.

XSI CEO Max Goldsmith says the unified data management program is eclipsing many of the majors in growth and is one of the fastest growing backup solutions in the world. “One of the big plusses is it seems to be more user-friendly,” says Goldsmith. “It is much easier for people to pick up and understand and learn.”

The solution was a consolidated backup provided by a tape library designed to handle the entire environment's backup window, giving incremental backups during the week and a full backup on the weekend.

Arthur selected ADIC's Scalar I2000 for several nifty features such as self-monitoring, "but most importantly an awful lot of drives," he says. The I2000 is fairly self-contained as it integrates management functions such as remote diagnostics, proactive alerting, drive usage reports and library partitioning. It can also scale to 3400 tape cartridges, leaving plenty of headroom for growth.

The extra space was fortunate because later that year CCH acquired a data-mining company that required 24TB, a serious amount of storage 12 months ago. The unusual brief - a NAS-style cache, single volume across a Windows server - meant there were few available options. XSI settled on the NetApp FAS3020, which has a maximum capacity of 84TB and 336 disks and could address multiple servers.

The NetApp supports file services, fibre channel and IP SAN and uses FlexVol technology to boost storage utilisation by up to 50 percent. One of the latest additions to NetApp's mid-range, it uses a modular design to achieve high scalability and uses SATA disks for economy and high density.

“At the time [the FAS3020] was a brand-spanking new solution,” says Arthur, as were most of the other devices selected for the project. XSI works as closely with vendors and their roadmaps as possible to future-proof its customers from obsolescence, which is a real danger during times of rapid technological advancement.

“In fact the integrator's sales team were considering a now-superseded product at the time but switched to the Netapp 3020 as soon as they heard of its release. The ADIC tape library had been on the market for just six months, which is the early dawn of its six or seven year lifecycle."

CCH is automatically entitled to upgrades for the CommVault software as part of the support contract, so they are fairly well protected in that sense, says Arthur.

The implementation went through seamlessly and the NetApp was up and running within a week during which it was well-tested by several incidents that caused a complete shutdown of CCH's network. “Every time the array elegantly shut itself down, protected all the data, and we would come in and reset the boxes,” says Arthur.

The data-mining company also looks after its own backup and has recently moved to Optus' Ultimo facility. The remote offices and Ultimo business are all connected by dark fibre links.

Since then CCH has purchased a second NetApp 3020 for its main data centre and a smaller model (the FAS270) for its Melbourne branch.

In the wings are future projects such as disaster recovery for the bulk of CCH's applications. The most likely solution will be a second FAS3020 in the Ultimo data centre that will provide a full image of its counterpart at the primary site using snap mirroring.

So what was the toughest part of the project? “Probably convincing them that we had a better storage solution than everyone else,” laughs Arthur. Once the tender went out there was a mad frenzy with dozens of integrators pushing their own solution sets. Not all have the client's interests foremost in their mind.

“A lot of drive-bys occur,” says Arthur. “There are organisations that will slam in the cheapest product available, make it as cheap as possible and hope it works.”

Arthur remembers the turning point at which CCH picked XSI from the squabbling crowd of suitors. The publishing company had asked XSI about one particular solution that XSI had previously encountered, which was being pushed by a competitor. In fact Arthur had worked on an implementation using the very same software for another customer, and after spending many hours attempting to make it work had eventually pulled it out and replaced it with another application.

“It was an absolute disaster for us. We spent every second day out there trying to make the thing work and the cost of sale went through the roof.”

The XSI team took the CCH management through a demonstration in their own labs and showed the problems with the software and that the competitor's recommended tape libraries couldn't scale to meet requirements either.

Arthur refuses to name the application other than to say that it was a “down and dirty cheap offering that at the time was an up and coming flavour in the Australian marketplace [but] has since disappeared.”

Proving that their rivals' suggestions were inadequate was a major step in winning the customer's trust. Two other factors that cemented the relationship were references from satisfied customers and a commitment to long-term support that would ensure that all CCH's needs were met as they developed.

XSI has now been working for CCH for three years and is starting a new project every quarter. Meeting targets within the timeframe has reinforced the sense of trust in the relationship. The backup project was completed on time, says Arthur. “I think we were fairly honest and accurate with those calculations and I think it was three weeks to do it.”