Storage overhaul for event manager

Like a lot of organisations, rapid growth and the need to move to new premises sparked an overhaul of this event management company’s IT infrastructure, including storage.

Moving Venue Management (MVM) began in Sydney 10 years ago with one employee, but in recent months it outgrew its office and moved all 15 employees to a new location twice the size.

Meryl Whetton, MVM’s general manager, says they took the opportunity to update equipment and the company’s e-commerce capabilities at the same time.

"We moved offices between Christmas [2004] and New Year and allowed ourselves three days to do all the new installations. We had all new computers, with heaps of new software and upgrades. It was basically done in one day," she says.

MVM has two large servers. One server is dedicated to online registrations for conferencing, and they often have up to five conferences registering concurrently.

"We have to store registration details and flight and accommodation preferences, process online payments, work with travel agents, and organise tours and accommodation both locally and overseas," Whetton says.

A lot of the company’s storage is taken up with emails, and Whetton says because of the type of information being stored, MVM had to do a major overhaul of its backup systems to ensure data is stored accurately and remains secure.

Whetton says she chose Computer Information Agency (CIA) as her IT provider because she had previously worked with that company’s principal, Robert Crane. "Basically, he looks after all our IT needs. If I have a problem, he comes up with a couple of solutions and we talk it over as to which way to go," she says.

Crane’s company, CIA, is a Computer Associates reseller based in Sydney. When asked to sort out MVM’s storage, one of Crane’s primary objectives was to keep storage as simple as possible.

He says the simplest solution was a single tape unit that could hold the total capacity of the data that the client needed to be backed up. Basically one cartridge for all their data because SMBs do not want to worry about complexity. They want to put one tape in and take one tape out and to know they have all their data backed up in one single location; nice and simple.

"MVM had a previous version of [CA’s] ARCserve and we upgraded to the latest version of BrightStor. They were basically incorporating an e-commerce solution to handle their event management online and their storage needs were growing dramatically," he says.

Crane says he is seeing phenomenal growth in email data in all his SMBs. Instead of the information being stored in a file system, it is now locked up in an exchange database. "So if the exchange database has a problem or fails, the customer may not be able to access up to 16GB worth of information that they’ve got stored in their mail server."

He says too many SMBs are too casual about their data and just do not realise that if they lose their data and cannot restore it, they can potentially go out of business.

"They don’t appreciate backups and disaster recovery. They can replace their people, their machines, their operating system, basically everything else, but if they lose that information off their server and it’s not backed up, then they’re going to struggle," he cautions.  


The fix

CIA monitors and reports to MVM on a weekly basis on the status of their storage systems and the success of their backups.

Another thing Crane did was identify some potential risks in data management practices. MVM used to have one single backup that backed up both its servers, but now each server is backed up separately and independently, which is a safer way to go.

"It also makes it a lot easier to restore and to get files back, which we have to do from time to time," Whetton says.

Crane says when he first upgraded MVM, the company had a DDS3 solution that was adequate on the old server but when it was installed on the new server it became inadequate and they were running over two tapes.

"We then put forward some options -- whether to go to DDS5 or go up to a high-end LTO solution," Crane says. "We sat down with them and outlined the costs involved and their expected data growth. They took the decision to go to DDS5 as an intermediary step before going to LTO because LTO was just too expensive in the current budget year that they had."