ALS has won a Council for Medical Schemes (CMS) contract to supply an NEC-based hybrid backup storage system.
The solution consists of low-cost NEC network attached disk storage equipped with a high capacity cartridge tape drive.
ALS, as a partner of NEC Computers (SA), was requested to investigate the Council for Medical Schemes` method for backing up its data. CMS is the Regulator of all Medical Schemes in South Africa. It collects Healthcare Broker and Brokerage Accreditation, Scheme Registration, Rule Amendment, complaints and Statutory Financial Return Data. It is vital that this information be accessible at any time. An effective backup strategy that will support the rapid restoration of data in the event of a system problem is therefore very important.
After considering a variety of options, Mr Jaap K"ugel, CMS Snr. Manager for IT decided to implement the hybrid backup solution that ALS recommended. With a hybrid solution, data is first backed up to network attached disk storage, and then later spooled to magnetic tape. "The hybrid approach offers us a number of important benefits"; Jaap K"ugel explained; "Restoring data from disk in the event of a problem is much quicker and less troublesome than restoring from tape. This means we can offer our users a higher level of service. Adopting the hybrid solution is also very cost effective for us because it means that we don`t have to invest in a tape library. The backup to disk runs over night without operator intervention, and the spooling to tape is then done during normal office hours the following day when an operator is available to load the tape."
ALS proposed the NEC NS160 Network Attached Storage Appliance configured with 480GB of disk storage and an internal AIT-3 tape drive with 230GB capacity per cartridge. This provides CMS with sufficient disk storage capacity for its daily and weekly backup cycles and a high capacity tape to spool to at a very cost-effective price.
"We achieved our objective within budget and without compromising on performance or availability," explained Jaap. "The NS160 is being utilised for online repository of backup information for the entire organisation."
"Full weekly backups and daily incremental backups are done to disk over night and then spooled to tape the following day. As a result, there is only one weekly tape change. All backups to disk are performed at night. Spooling to tape can either be scheduled at night or during the day, whichever is preferable," he added.
ALS Director Robin Baker explains; "Traditionally server data has been backed up directly to tape drives. This addresses the need for an off-line backup copy, but restoring a particular data set or an individual file can be complex and time consuming. The modern business requirement demands a different approach where the focus is on restoring data quickly and conveniently whenever this is required for whatever reason.
The availability of affordable network attached RAID disk storage with costs as low as R 50 per gigabyte (R 50 000 per Terabyte) greatly facilitates this by making hybrid or 2 stage backup an affordable option. The network attached disk storage is used as a staging area before copying the data to tape. Restores can then normally be made from disk, which is much quicker and less problematic than restores from tape."
"One of the benefits of a hybrid disk-tape backup solution is that it changes the backup schedule and the rotation/retention policy. Because restoring from disk is much simpler and quicker than restoring from tape it is quite feasible to offer an effective restore service with a weekly full backup and daily incremental backups. Normally with tape backups it is necessary to run full backups every day because restoring from an incremental tape backup is complex and time consuming. This can significantly reduce the requirement for tape media, which can be a substantial saving for a large system."
"Network attached storage systems like the NS160 are high availability devices with RAID protected disk based data sets. This facilitates quick data recovery in the event of a data loss, for whatever reason." He continued: "In fact, using disk for backup data offers better business continuance. NAS disk storage can be made highly available, where many tape solutions are prone to failure. There are few things as discouraging as finding that you can`t read your backup tapes when you are trying to restore a crashed system."
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