University of San Diego Implements Deduplication Appliance to Back Up Highly Virtualized Environment
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The University of San Diego has
virtualized nearly all of its IT infrastructure and has now dramatically reduced
the backup times and storage requirements for its virtual environment, all while
saving money.
About five years ago, USD began investigating virtualization to improve the
efficiency of its processing, storage and data center technology. The IT team
invested in VMware and built an infrastructure that enabled the university to be
highly virtualized for its Windows and Linux-based systems. The team continued
to research virtualization technology and refine its virtualization strategy,
leading it to implement a
Vblock System 300 series
from VCE, which includes networking, storage technology and software.
The university's infrastructure is now 98 percent virtualized, and the only
reason it isn't 100 percent is because the remaining portion of the university's
IT infrastructure requires physical hardware or otherwise cannot be virtualized.
Challenge
While USD's highly virtualized environment improved its efficiency, it
generated so much data that backups couldn't complete within their designated
time windows. The university was backing up more than 200 terabytes on a weekly
basis, and simply adding more hard drives to the backup system was no longer a
cost-effective option. That was when Mike Somerville, manager of system services
at USD, began researching deduplication systems to compress the volume of data
being backed up, so the backups could complete on time.
In its search for the best fit, USD had two fundamental goals: "The
first goal was to be able to complete our full and incremental data backups in a
timely way," said Christopher Wessells, vice provost and CIO. "And
secondly, find a cost-effective solution that would allow us to back up and
restore our data without spending massive amounts of money on ever-increasing
demands for more storage."
Somerville had more specific goals: "Ease of installation, ease of
management and ease of use," he said. "I have a finite number of people who
run our infrastructure, so I don't want to install cool technology for
technology's sake and then have to train a whole bunch of people on something
that is simply too difficult." While some of his highly technical staff
members would be using the system, he also wanted other, less technical people
to be able to log on and perform a rudimentary restore if necessary.
Solution
The team settled on a Quantum
DXi6700 Series deduplication appliance with
vmPRO
software. "It was an ideal fit for an institution of our size and the total
data needs of the institution," said Wessells.
The team at USD collaborated with Quantum and
Partners Data Systems to implement
the solution in less than a week. "That involves it physically being on site — allocating space and talking with facilities and getting power and that sort
of thing," said Somerville. "Once the system was powered up, it was several
hours after that that it became functional."
USD is a liberal arts institution with four centralized data centers, and the
Quantum system manages the entire university's backups. The vmPRO software
handles the backup and restoration of all of the Windows and Linux virtual
machines, and the university uses
CommVault software to manage the backup and restoration of data that is
stored on network-attached storage.
The vmPRO and CommVault software control the flow of data to the DXi6700
deduplication appliance, which intelligently compresses the data by eliminating
duplicate copies of any data. The system uses inline data deduplication, so the
DXi compresses the data as it stores it. "So it's not like I need to take 20
terabytes of data and put 20 terabytes of data somewhere and then manipulate it
after the fact," said Somerville. "I simply copy the 20 terabytes of data into
this system, and it ends up being one terabyte of data."
The backups are stored on the DXi appliance itself, and once they reach a
certain age, they are moved off the device to inexpensive tape backup for
long-term offsite archival.
Results
The team at USD has been thrilled with the results of the implementation. The
system compresses the backup data at a ratio of 20-to-1, which saves storage
space. "Right now, the actual amount of space we're using is just about 10
terabytes, which means that we're backing up almost a quarter of a petabyte of
actual data," said Somerville. And the system uses 256-bit encryption to ensure
that the backed up data is secure.
The system has also dramatically reduced the amount of time required for backups. "It used to take many hours and now it takes about one hour or
less," said Somerville.
Somerville and Wessells expect the system to scale with their data growth for
years to come. They are currently using 10 terabytes of the system's 32 terabyte
capacity, and it can expand to 80 terabytes. "That's future-proofing us for the
next few years for sure," said Wessells.
By the time they max out their 80 terabytes, Somerville has "no doubt that
the model that they will provide us will grow to much larger than 80
terabytes."
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].