University of Hull introduces data archiving as part of long term data management strategy and reduce carbon footprint
Background
The University of Hull has a population of almost 20,000 students and 2,500 staff, and has campuses in Hull and Scarborough (England). The City of Hull is situated in East Yorkshire, on the northern shore of the Humber Estuary. Scarborough is a North Yorkshire seaside town, 40 miles further up the North Sea coast.
An increase in storage demand by its data users and a commitment to addressing environmental issues meant the University needed a data management solution that would help manage the rapid growth in stored data, cut backup windows and reduce the environmental impact of its storage infrastructure as part of the Carbon Trust’s Higher Education Carbon Management (HECM).
Much of the University's storage is taken up by files and multimedia content for teaching and learning material. There is also research related information including mapping data used by the Geography department and X-ray and imaging information retained by Medical Engineering.
The Challenge "We've seen a big increase in storage
demand and want to plan for the future so that we're
managing costs as well as cutting the energy and
resources we're devoting to storage and backup as
part of our commitment to the environment"
said Dr David Jarvis, Desktop and Data Services
Manager for the University's Computing Services
department.
Addressing the environmental issue is an important
driver because the University of Hull is actively
working to measure and cut its carbon footprint
as part of the HECM programme. "For
many years, we only had ¾ TB of central storage
to accommodate the requirements of both students
and staff. After moving to the Network Appliance
solution two years ago, this quickly expanded to
20 TB," explained Dr Jarvis.
"Many of our users were storing large
amounts of important information on their own hard
drives and other devices. Moving this to central
storage - coupled with a general increase in demand
- meant we had to plan ahead before our data management
got out of control."
The Solution
Working with systems integrator NexStor a BridgeHead reseller, the University chose the BH FileStore® data archiving solution software to automatically archive data from its Network Appliance fibre channel storage system onto secondary media, including SATA disk.
The University was initially hesitant about adopting archiving because of a previous bad experience with an Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) product, which had resulted in it losing some data. After evaluating a variety of archiving products, Dr Jarvis and his team were impressed with the BridgeHead FileStore demonstration that NexStor had arranged.
"We were very reassured by the demo
which persuaded us that BH FileStore could keep
our data accessible and viewable once it was in
the archive," explained Dr Jarvis,
describing BH FileStore's 'stubbing' facility which
makes archived data transparent to end users. Data
that is removed from the primary store is replaced
with 1KB placeholders, or stubs, which effectively
allow end users to access the file content from
the archive as if still in the live environment.
Because the software enables data to be catalogued
and indexed before entering the archive, it is also
possible to perform advanced searches by file content
and attribute.
The Benefits "We need to keep data, especially research
data, for many years. And because some of it doesn't
need to be accessed frequently we saw an opportunity
to archive it to lower cost disk storage. Over time,
older data will be moved off line to removable storage
such as tape or optical media." Commented
Dr Jarvis.
Over the long term, this means the University will not be amassing little used data on its primary storage. In addition to reducing storage costs, this will have the knock-on benefits of cutting the size of daily backups as well as reducing the volume of data that might need to be replicated to a secondary disaster recovery site, which is something the University is considering.
"Reducing backup volumes was important
because backup windows were already approaching
twelve hours and we could see this becoming an even
greater problem in the future. And of course by
using less spinning disk, reducing backups and minimizing
the data we might need to replicate we reduce the
power and cooling resources we consume overall,"
said Dr Jarvis.
Another important factor in the selection process was the fact that BridgeHead was a well established company with UK support as Dr Jarvis explained. "We're putting in place a long term strategy so we wanted to avoid newer suppliers who we couldn't be sure would be around in years to come. And it was important that they could support us from the UK because we didn't want to encounter the same issues we've had when making technical support calls to other countries.
In addition, the licensing model offered by BridgeHead allows us to control our costs. We're not charged on the basis of
the number of users as some other suppliers wanted to do. With over 20,000 potential users this would work out way
too expensive. Instead we're being charged a set amount based on the volume of data we archive. So not only is it one
of the best products we've seen, it's also affordable."
About BridgeHead
BridgeHead Software is a
leading provider of backup, recovery and archive software for enterprises. With over 450 customers worldwide BridgeHead leads the
field in Enterprise Data Management.
