Requirements

An industrial customer wanted an universal archiving solution to handle their heterogeneous applications: Windows Fileserver, E-mail server, Document Management System (DMS) application server and a UNIX-based CAD engineering solution.

Goal

To establish a secure long-term archive with as little investment as possible.

Solution

ISV software products were already in existence to handle the e-mail, file and DMS applications. Until now, these products have been archiving the data locally on jukeboxes or disk-based systems. This data is now written centrally to the ARCHIVEMANAGER which keeps it available on the performance disk for twelve months but also stores several copies locally on tape and SATA, as well as writing an additional copy to tape in the second computer center. The existing SAN disk system is used as performance disk. The disk archive ensures rapid access and the two additional tape copies provide doubled security in order to prevent data loss.

The CAD engineering data refers to project developments which are written completely via NFS to tape after the project is completed. This data is saved locally and in the second computer center. As access speed is not important when it comes to this data, it is archived exclusively to tape. In the event of access, generally, all of the data for the project is recalled.

Result

New investment in the ARCHIVEMANAGER software; SATA RAID system – partitioned for email, DMS and Fileserver data; Intel-based server. An existing SAN system, used as performance disk, and existing backup LTO libraries locally and in the second computer center, were both integrated into the solution.