BRITANNIA GROUP:

THE JOURNEY FROM TAPE TO DISK

Britannia undertook a 2 year project to move its primary backup target from tape to disk, a journey that began in the middle of 2007 and completed in early 2009. This transition, supported throughout by ACS, occurred in 2 main phases: the first to test the concept with secondary data and the second, based upon the success of the first, to backup and replicate Britannia’s entire live infrastructure.

THE CHALLENGE: PHASE 1

Regulations around data protection from the FSA (Financial Services Authority) dictate that customer information must be securely stored at least 10 miles away from an organisation’s principal data centre.

For Britannia, compliance could have been achieved simply by transporting tapes daily, by road, to a remote site some 10 miles away. However, this was considered a weak and potentially dangerous strategy by Britannia’s IT team: “Our customer data is the lifeblood of our organisation and as such is priceless,” said Dylan Mathias, Unix and Storage Manager at Britannia. “We didn’t want to just put it in the back of a van every day and hope for the best. We are determined to never be front page news because of data loss.”

The FSA and Britannia had agreed a 5-month time limit on implementation so Britannia needed to choose a solution that was not only fully compliant with the regulations but that could also be rolled out swiftly.

THE SOLUTION: PHASE 1

Using Data Domain’s replication and inline deduplication software on three DD580 systems, ACS supported Britannia in the design and implementation of their new backup solution. This provided a near-instantaneous DR (disaster recovery) solution via replicated backups, delivered via a secure network to a DR site some 140 miles away. All key production was previously offsited once a week via this method.

The Data Domain solution provided by ACS was quick to deploy, cost effective and above all secure, ensuring that Britannia would not only meet but significantly exceed the level of data security specified by FSA regulations. The 5 month FSA deadline was easily met despite the collaborative effort involved, allowing Britannia to focus on plans to develop their use of the technologies.

When the implementation went live in November 2007, the volume of critical data requiring offsite replication & backup initially stood at 33TB and included data from Oracle databases, Windows file servers and email.

PHASE 2: TAPE SILO REPLACEMENT

Britannia’s entire live infrastructure is now replicated between 2 data centres, backing up 320TB of primary data to Data Domain devices.

During 2008, ACS worked with Britannia to build upon the infrastructure delivered during Phase 1 of the journey from tape to disk with an end goal of replacing an aging tape silo backup infrastructure. Having recently acquired a new data centre, Britannia’s backups moved from an approach where certain sites that were viewed as livehad copies of specific backups sent offsite to a model where both data centres were viewed as equals and all data backed up at each site was also replicated to the other building.

Neil Allison, Britannia's Chief Backup Specialist commented: "What quickly became apparent was the resilience, flexibility and speed now inherent within Britannia's enterprise backup environment, using Data Domain backup disk devices. In conjunction with NFS and Symantec Netbackup technology, we are now able to better sustain our backup service, and recover quickly from scenarios ranging from complete site to individual device failure."

This bi-directional replication of backups not only increases security of the data by reducing the chance of loss, it also greatly simplifies administration and information management as all their data has an offsite copy. Mathias commented: “If it’s backed up, it’s also offsite as soon as the job completes. We like to keep things simple - life’s easier to manage that way.”

The ACS solution also offers an impressive global compression ratio of around 16 to 1, storing 320TB of data on just 20TB of disk.

IN SUMMARY

Britannia was delighted with the simplicity and efficiency of the ACS solution, which has dramatically reduced the backup window, improved job concurrency and significantly enhanced performance and resilience. Scalability of the solution was demonstrated by the ease with which the infrastructure put in for Phase 1 was upgraded to accommodate the requirements of Phase 2.

Britannia’s approach to the overhaul of its new backup and replication infrastructure allowed them to evaluate the efficacy, reliability and performance of disk-based backup with selected secondary data prior to the incorporation of its core primary data in Phase 2. This significantly de-risked the change in technology for their primary backup targets.

The solution provides a clear financial advantage of reduced transportation and removable media costs, delivering tangible solution benefits. Furthermore, the elimination of previously essential human intervention and dependency on mechanical tape has added an extra layer of reliability into the backup process whilst freeing up IT staff to focus on core business functions.