York St John University
selects Archiving Software to Support ILM Roll-Out
The Challenge
York St John University, employs approximately 600 staff and serves over 6,000 students at its location right at the centre of the historical City of York. The eight acre site on Lord Mayor's Walk is in a beautiful setting facing the Minster across the City Walls.
The University's IT team first began looking at
archiving technology to help manage the accelerating
growth of file data as Peter Mather, Network Management
& Development Officer, explains: "Our employee file
data has expanded by 50 per cent to 600GB in 18
months, with much of the increase being driven by
the growing popularity of multimedia files. We were
running out of disk space, our full weekly backup
was taking up to 14 hours and it was fast getting
to the stage where we would need to expand the backup-to-disk
system we had installed quite recently."
The Solution
It was suggested that Mather and his team look at BH FileStore® data archiving software from BridgeHead. It quickly
became clear that BH FileStore could help support an ILM strategy to address the University's data growth and backup problems by taking much of the static and seldom accessed data off the organisation's primary store, thereby reducing the cost and management burden.
BH FileStore is a policy based automated storage management system that analyses, monitors, and reports on primary disk utilisation. The system automatically copies and repositions data based on IT policies to a full range of secondary storage targets. IT can define and enforce unlimited rules for any logical data set to ensure that primary disk is optimally utilised and secondary copies of data exist on any combination of media and at multiple locations in compliance with internal and external data availability standards. The system is storage 'independent', providing unlimited flexibility for selecting and deploying different types of storage media.
The Benefits "We're currently running a consultation
exercise involving various departments within the
University to help agree the policies that will
underpin our ILM programme," explained
Mather. "Part of this will be about
what and how we archive. What data can be automatically
transferred to the archive if it hasn't been modified
or accessed for a certain time period? And what
will need to be kept on-line for longer? These decisions
are yet to be finalised but we've estimated that
we could possibly archive as much as half the data
we currently hold on primary storage."
The introduction of ILM archiving will also help the University manage data retention in line with compliance requirements under The Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information Act. The ability to intelligently manage retention cycles for data held within the archive was one of the key reasons for selecting BH FileStore. Another area that impressed Mather and his team was BH FileStore's 'stubbing' facility which makes archived data transparent to end users. Data which is removed from the primary store is replaced with a 1KB placeholder or stub which effectively allows end users to access the file content from the archive as if it is still in the live environment. Because the software enables data to be catalogued and indexed before it enters the archive, it can also be possible to perform advanced searches by file content and attribute.
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.
