The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) has selected VERITAS storage management software as one of the technologies on which it will build its storage-networking infrastructure, addressing the needs of various government departments for 24x7 availability.
SITA has evaluated and selected the product based on the need for fail-over, business continuity, disaster recovery and competitive pricing.
"As a government agency, it is incumbent upon us to spend wisely and, having seen the VERITAS product suite in action in an environment very similar to our own, we are confident that we have made the right choice," explained Sagren Pillay, technical manager open systems at SITA.
According to SITA, government IT infrastructure is heterogeneous in every sense of the world. "We have EMC and Sun storage systems, HP and Sun servers, IBM systems as well as servers running Microsoft Windows NT/2000 and Novell NetWare. In such a complex environment, effective resource management is needed to provide 24x7 availability," he explained.
Tracey Hutchins, account manager at VERITAS Software, said three products are key to SITA's storage management strategy: "SITA has Volume Manager, File System and NetBackup. Volume Manager provides virtualisation, File System offers performance and the ability to recover quickly in the event of corruption and NetBackup provides critical backup functionality," she said.
Pillay said storage plays an important role in assuring system availability because, at any given time, capacity can run out. "Implementing a SAN strategy with storage virtualisation, allows SITA to allocate and re-allocate storage resources dynamically as and when we need to," he noted.
"SITA is providing state departments with a foundation that is scalable, providing them the performance required now and in future, offering central management, constant availability, and meeting their disaster recovery needs," said Pillay.
"This is to ensure more efficient and cost-effective use of existing and future resources. For example, we may have a terabyte of storage sitting in a particular department, not being fully utilised. At the same time, we could have another department that is rapidly running out of storage capacity. We must be able to share those resources across departments. VERITAS storage management software offers that functionality.
"The moment you start integrating, you find automatically that information becomes centralised and shared. And when you start sharing volumes of information across departments, high availability and consistency of that information becomes critical," he added.
Gartner and IDC research reports that 75% of most IT budgets are spent on storage." Analysts also believe for every $1 spent on storage hardware, between $4 and $7 is spent on software to manage that hardware. In spite of this, however, at least 50% of storage hardware is under-utilised at all," said Hutchins.
Another key point for SITA is disaster recovery. "As soon as you move to 24x7, your backup and maintenance window diminishes to the point where it is non-existent. To cope with this you need a SAN infrastructure that allows you to manage that non-existent window, typically through the user of snap-shot backups," added Pillay.
Fail-over is also critical where content uptime is a requirement. "SITA has operations in Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Pretoria, and the intent is to fail-over via the SAN infrastructure to any other centre should it be required," he added.
Looking ahead, Pillay says SITA's decision to adopt VERITAS products as one of their storage management products is part of a broader plan to maximise government IT resources and, thereby offers support to its various departments. "By choosing VERITAS, we're embraced a broad range of industry standards and given notice to potential suppliers that any solutions offered to government must comply with those standards and fall within the ambit of that out strategy as a whole," he noted.
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