Parks Victoria's 1,000-strong workforce is charged with preserving these areas, including 3.96 million hectares of land constituting 17 percent of the state.
The challenge
Until 2005, the government statutory body relied on dated information infrastructure technology incorporating tape-based backup and minimal disaster recovery capabilities.
In late 2005, Parks Victoria commenced a comprehensive upgrade of its information infrastructure.
This included an evaluation of its ability to recover in the event of a significant interruption or business systems failure.
"We had a paper-based disaster recovery plan, but no actual disaster recovery hardware and we would have to pray that operating system or application CDs survived any event," said John Webster, infrastructure manager, Parks Victoria.
"If we were forced to rebuild our entire server, storage, personal computer, and networking environment, it would take us between three weeks and three months to complete."
Estates managed by Parks Victoria received more than 76.1 million visits in 2006-07 and many visitors camp and hike in renowned parks such as Wilsons Promontory.
The company relies heavily on online booking and point-of-sale systems to enable Victorians and visitors to access accommodation.
These systems are required to operate 24x7, and outages, particularly in busy periods, can frustrate users and compromise the workforce to deliver on its objectives.
It also relies on internal systems such as e-mail, Oracle Financials, Oracle Human Resources, and RSA security software to operate.
"Before the last two years, we had a few outages, which prompted our focus on business continuity," said Webster. "We could not afford to continue to have these difficulties."
In addition, Parks Victoria needed to ensure continued compliance with financial reporting requirements imposed by the state Auditor-General.
"The A-G requires us to undertake certain disaster recovery tasks twice a year to ensure we can restore information," added Webster.
"They would ask us to retrieve two e-mails and two transactions undertaken within the past year.
"Using our tape-based backup, it would take us several days at a time. We were not happy with this and wanted to bring the time back down to one day."
"The Global Storage solution based on EMC infrastructure meets all our requirements. If there is a business continuity interruption, they take responsibility for getting our servers back up and running," said Webster.
The solution
Implementing a Managed Disaster Recovery Solution, the Parks Victoria information technology team set about stabilising the organisation's infrastructure.
Disaster recovery emerged as a key priority. Parks Victoria also realised it had to develop an archiving strategy to reduce data volumes and ensure retained data was stored efficiently and effectively.
A year and a half after commencing the project, Parks Victoria released a tender seeking an outsourced disaster recovery solution to provide end-to-end business continuity and offsite storage capabilities to its primary facility.
"We had eight companies submit expressions of interest to provide the solution and this was reduced to three," said Webster.
"We selected managed services provided by Global Storage as they met all of our requirements for a complete disaster recovery solution with the added bonus of a managed backup service.
"The Global Storage solution provided a secondary site, ongoing management, 24x7 support, and a stringent service level agreement around recovery time."
Parks Victoria implemented the solution in October 2007.
Global Storage is servicing the contract using its DataReady Remote Data Backup Service and the EnvironmentReady Environment Replication Service.
DataReady replaces internal tape systems with an automated remote server backup and EnvironmentReady ensures recovery of data and applications at the Global Storage offsite data centre.
The existing data centre incorporates storage area network (SAN) equipment that supports VMware server virtualisation technologies.
VMware High Availability and VMware VMotion enhances redundancy and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) delivers accurate, predictive load balancing.
The company runs business-critical or business-important applications on 30 servers, 24 of which are virtual machines.
The organisation operates about 100 servers in total.
"The VMware software includes predictive technology that enables the dynamic movement of services from hardware nodes that experience problems such as faulty memory," added Webster.
"This means we can avoid any significant downtime that impacts on system stability and availability."
Conclusion
The Global Storage DataReady solution employs EMC Avamar data de-duplication and replication software to back up servers in minutes.
That backup data is transferred offsite each night over a wide area network (WAN) link to secure data storage facilities.
The solution includes a local installation of Avamar at Parks Victoria's data centre and an offsite installation at the Global Storage facility.
The onsite local storage appliance enables Parks Victoria to access and restore up to 35 days worth of snapshots over Gigabit Ethernet.
This local data cache allows the organisation to access recently-stored data faster than having to restore over the WAN from the Global Storage facility.
It also ensures the company continues to access important data in the event of a problem with the WAN.
Avamar uses intelligent algorithms to determine on a daily basis what information has been changed in a file rather than just those files that have changed, reducing the data that must be updated before being stored.
"This means that if five or 10 users receive the same 20MB attachment on e-mail, the software recognises that and only saves the one copy," said David Duncan CEO Global Storage.
"If one or more users subsequently make changes to that attachment, only the changes are captured.
"Consequently, once a full backup is taken, only an average of one percent of data needs to be backed up per day to create a full backup point .
"This is much less than the 10 percent per day typical of some incremental backup solutions and significantly less than the 100 percent per day required by full backups."
The Avamar deployment means that most daily server backups can now be completed in 30 minutes and larger Microsoft Exchange and file server backups in four hours.
With WAN links proving expensive, the lower data volumes being replicated offsite mean the company requires a lower-capacity link and consequently can reduce costs.
The backed-up server images are captured and replicated to the Global Storage EnvironmentReady recovery centre, where they can be redeployed onto VMware virtual server standby infrastructure and an EMC CLARiiON CX3-40 networked storage system in the event of a disaster.
This recovery process is managed by Global Storage as part of its managed service offering.
Parks Victoria also now monitors and manages its protected data using the Global Storage GlobalView web portal.
This provides visibility into backups and the service provider's easy restore capabilities.
According to Webster, Global Storage was prepared to assume risks previously borne by Parks Victoria.
This was another point of differentiation in the tender assessment process.
"If there is a business continuity interruption, Global Storage takes responsibility for getting our servers back up and running," said Webster.
"Under the terms of our agreement, business-critical applications are restored in six hours and less critical applications in 24 hours."
The managed service has enabled the company to reallocate the staff who would otherwise be required to manage its environment.
"The solution gives the business peace of mind as Global Storage technicians have the skills and expertise to ensure business continuity, and rapid recovery in the event of an outage," said Webster.
"Parks Victoria itself does not have the capabilities to do this sort of thing.
"We have achieved our target of reducing time taken to recover protected data to less than one day and more often within minutes, eliminating the unplanned downtime that threatened to compromise the performance of our tasks," added Webster.
Parks Victoria expect to phase out their tape solution in the near future, as it is now able to run restores online using the GlobalView User Web Portal.
"We have found that tape is highly unreliable just when you need it the most," said Webster.
"Most of our restores can now be done online, which reduces our reliance on tape."
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