Liberty Life has upgraded its data storage facilities at a cost of R3 million with the creation of a disaster recovery library at Liberty Life Centre in Braamfontein.
MGX Holdings company CMS was prime supplier in the upgrade. CMS`s involvement began three years ago when the specialist data storage company supplied Liberty with 14 high-speed Timberline tape drives for an existing 18 000-cartridge Comparex tape library, storing data generated by the production and development systems.
The Comparex library provided a partial solution, as copies of backup cartridges were still being physically taken to archives, a slow process with inherent security drawbacks. To complete the process of automation, Liberty embarked on an extensive upgrade involving a fully fledged disaster recovery site comprising three StorageTek 9740 TimberWolf libraries using existing Timberline drives.
The three libraries can store 1 500 tape cartridges in total and are connected to the production and development systems via high-speed Escon fibre optic links.
CMS account manager Tom Borkett says the production system and its Adabas database continue to use the original Comparex library, now equipped with four StorageTek Timberline drives and eight StorageTek Silverton drives. "There is a further upgrade in the pipeline which will equip one of the 9740 libraries with StorageTek`s new-generation 9840 drives," says Borkett.
The 9840 drives feature cartridges with 20GB of native storage capacity each; with 500 cartridges in each library their total capacity will be some 30 000GB.
Hamid Essop, Liberty assistant GM, ITS operations, says: "The performance of the StorageTek libraries has been an outstanding success with the time for production backups being reduced from seven to 2,5 hours. This has enabled Liberty to provide a better online service to its users."
"No disaster recovery system can succeed without a structured backup procedure," notes Borkett.
This is CMS`s third recent success in the insurance industry.
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