The information age is definitely here

Remote Electronic Storage Solutions

(RESS)

I.S. Solution Center

Storage Technology Corporation
2270 South 88th Street
Louisville, Colorado 80028 USA

Abstract

StorageTek’s® family of Automated Cartridge Systems(ACS) enabled a new suite of solutions for tape processing challenges facing Information Systems (I.S). One of these challenges was disaster recovery and business resumption. Now through a combination of StorageTek hardware and software products, integrated into a total solution, automating the backup and restore components of the disaster recovery process for any computing platform is a reality.

PROBLEMS PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOLUTIONS

The information age is definitely here. From the home computer to the corporate supercomputer, information collection, movement, storage and sharing is of prime importance. And this is just the beginning. In the next five years the world will experience an unprecedented explosion of digital storage, creating new challenges as well as escalating the importance of current issues, such as disaster recovery and business resumption. Information is more than just a valuable asset, it is a competitive weapon and may actually be a prime factor in determining whether a corporation succeeds or fails. Protection of this information is key. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and man-made disasters such as bombing and power outages serve to raise the level of corporate awareness throughout the world to events that are beyond our control and can interrupt critical business functions.

StorageTek has addressed this ever-growing challenge by providing its customers with RESS. RESS allows a data center to create disaster recovery tapes in a location geographically separate from the production data center. Electronically backing up critical information to a remote facility eliminates the time to crate and then transport backup tapes to an alternate site and then uncrate and load backup tapes once they arrive at the site. Of even greater importance is the fact that RESS provides enhanced integrity for disaster backup data and faster resumption of service in the event of a disaster. Additional benefits of StorageTek’s RESS solution include:

Automates the process for off-site data storage
Minimizes the exposure window of the backup and restore process
Eliminates manual errors
Reduces labor costs
Eliminates lost or missing tapes
Reduces the costs for offsite storage and can eliminate the costs for a hot-site provider

PROOF OF THE PUDDING

StorageTek’s Information System’s (I.S.) environment is similar to most large businesses today, with critical information spread across many different computing platforms. So, key to implementing a viable RESS solution is selecting components that are OPEN, that will provide heterogeneous connectivity and operate with software and hardware from a wide variety of vendors.

StorageTek I.S. selected the following components to implement their RESS solution:

StorageTek 9310 Automated Cartridge System – The fastest automated tape library available in the market place at 450 exchanges per hour.
StorageTek 9490 Tape Drive – The highest performance, industry standard 36-track tape system available.
StorageTek SD-3 Helical Scan Cartridge Subsystem – Granular capacity of 10, 25, and 50 GB combined with a data rate of 11.2 MB per second.
StorageTek 9710 Automated Tape Library – Small footprint, high capacity and performance library for UNIX and NT computing systems.
DLT7000 – Cost-effective storage for large backup and archive applications.
StorageTek 913x Disk Subsystem – Rack mountable open systems disk for mission-critical corporate applications.
StorageTek Central Archive Manager (CAM) – A comprehensive data backup, restore and storage management solution in a single package.
Hierarchical Storage Manager – SAMS:Disk from Sterling provides storage management and backup capability from the OS/390 mainframe.

The following provides a pictorial representation of StorageTek’s RESS implementation.

The picture looks much more complex than the actual implementation. The combination of CAM/EBF, the 913x disk subsystem and the 9710 automated tape libraries coupled with DLT7000 tape drives provides a solution for the heterogeneous servers located throughout the corporation. The servers located in buildings 4 and 5 of the StorageTek campus are backed up to the RESS solution in building 9 and the servers residing in buildings other than 4 or 5 are backed up to the RESS solution located in building 4. For long-term archival backups, 1 – 7 years, CAM/MVS copies the data from the heterogeneous servers to mainframe disk. Two backup copies are created simultaneously using SAMS:Disk. One copy is retained in the 9310s residing in building 4 on either 9490 or SD-3 media and the second copy is retained in the 9310s located in building 9, again on either 9490 or SD-3.

For critical OS/390 and VM data, a similar process is used. SAMS:Disk creates a dual copy of the data with one copy retained in the building 4 ACS and the second copy retained in the building 9 ACS.

BENEFITS ACHIEVED

Through automation of the disaster recovery process, StorageTek has achieved all the perceived benefits of the RESS solution. RESS has minimized the backup and restore exposure window by speeding up both processes. It has eliminated manual errors, lost or missing tapes and reduced the labor costs previously associated with the manual process. RESS has reduced the use of an offsite storage facility providing hard dollar savings of approximately $2, 400 per month or $28,800 per year of ongoing expenditure. Even more significant in terms of cost savings is the elimination of a hot-site provider at a cost of over $1,000,000 per year. While RESS is not a hot-site solution by itself, it is the enabler of a self administered hot-site. Without the ability to automatically create and restore critical information from an offsite copy, an internal solution would not prove cost-effective. Of even greater importance however, and one that is difficult to assign a dollar value to, is the fact that the information that is critical to the operation of the entire corporation is now securely stored and accessible in the event of a true disaster situation.