U New Hampshire Consolidates Backup and Recovery Environments

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/14/08

The University of New Hampshire will deploy a new backup solution integrating a Sepaton virtual tape library (VTL) and DeltaStor software for data deduplication. The migration is part of a consolidation effort combining two separate backup and recovery environments into one disk-based storage infrastructure.

"By creating a single disk-based backup environment that will scale in capacity and performance to support the administrative and academic operations of the university, we will gain economies of scale and efficiencies that we want to leverage. It also provides a path to move away from physical tape as the primary backup medium," said Bob Rader, storage and backup manager. "But in order to justify replacing tape with disk, disk-based backup costs had to be reduced to compete with tape. Data deduplication with hardware compression became critical technology in our evaluation to solve the cost/capacity metric we needed to meet for disk-based storage."

The school's IT team wanted virtual tape library with data deduplication and hardware compression. Performance requirements were set at a sustained backup throughput of at least 350 Mb/second, with the ability to scale performance to 600 Mb/second to accommodate future expansion. To protect the large Oracle databases the university uses to store administrative data, the university set a minimum required throughput for any individual restore request at roughly 60 Mb/second and the ability to scale to 100 Mb/second when needed. The chosen solution also needed to connect to the university's common SAN and Symantec NetBackup software.

"Our 'stress-testing' showed that despite all the data we could throw at it, DeltaStor passed with flying colors," said Rader.

The university purchased an S2100-ES2 with 30 terabytes of usable space, along with a 20 Tb DeltaStor software configuration. The installation required less than a day.

"Our dedupe ratio requirements are conservative because our primary goal is simply to beat the cost of tape," said Rader. "But, as our initial testing shows, we fully expect to achieve ratios that exceed our goals, realizing capacity gains and costs savings for the university."