Storage Manager Data Management, Migration & Protection at Athilent Technology
Over the past decade the volume of data which has had to be stored and maintained for extended periods has been rising continuously. In an effort to meet these storage demands, IT departments have deployed a diverse range storage devices and technologies in a heterogeneous storage environment. Over the lifetime of the data this often results in the usage of an obsolete storage technology which places the data at risk and creates a competitive disadvantage. Sooner or later, all companies must migrate data from an obsolete storage system to a contemporary one. Obsolete technologies, failure of the manufacturer, an uncertain support situation or insufficient storage capacity are typical reasons for displacing an existing storage system. Carrying out the necessary data migration without data loss or access interruption is an immense challenge for IT-departments. Regulatory requirements and the risk of loss of business critical data may cause extreme financial damage and, in the worst case, this can reach amounts jeopardizing the existence of a company.
Overview
Athilent Technology Storage Manager is a universal storage management solution, which not only supports a combination of all contemporary mass storage technologies but also provides functions which meet the requirement for migration of data from existing storage hardware. The product was especially designed for the seamless data migration from obsolete storage systems like MO jukeboxes to new systems with state-of-the-art technologies such as Blu-ray Disc (BD), LTO Tape, NetApp Appliances and all hard disk based systems. This is realized by the Athilent Technology Virtual File System(VFS) Athilent Technology an innovative new concept first implemented in this solution. Athilent Technology Storage Manager makes it possible to rapidly migrate valuable data to a sustainable data storage solution, even if the displaced hardware is operated by other software.
Athilent Technology Storage Manager meets these requirements first by implementing the Athilent Technology VFS interface, which virtualizes the existing and new storage systems seamlessly and maintains transparent access for both users and applications to data on the existing systems. It integrates the existing and new storage devices without disturbing the application access to all existing information or its ability to store new data.
Policy-based Data Management
Athilent Technology Storage Manager then performs an automated background
migration of existing data from the displaced device to the new device,
so that the displaced storage system may be retired. The capability to
perform this migration with little effort over a controlled period of
time while maintaining continuous transparent access has a significant
advantage over other solutions. The user determines by definable rules
which data is to be migrated and whether or how long respectively, the
superseded storage system shall be in operation. Migrations will be
carried out automatically in the background, and most importantly
without effecting clients and applications access to all information.
Backup, Migration, and Archive
Critical data must be protected and made recoverable in the event it is no longer accessible. Each school and department has a fundamental need to protect their information and intellectual property. Considerable resources are required to do so, and the backup demand should be aggregated and satisfied by a central service to achieve economies of scale and consistent polices.
The backup service portfolio seeks to offer options that best fit the information that needs to be protected. The options range from file servers that can simply hold copies of files, to a versioning system that performs backups on an automatic schedule and stores copies in a remote location.
IT Services historically has offered a single backup service, but has added options to meet new demands in the past few years. IT Services will continue to expand backup and archive services by adding additional backup and archive tiers, improving utilization, reducing dependency on low-density tape by leveraging disk, and reducing and consolidating the existing environment to lower maintenance and operations costs.
Current State
IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is the primary system used by IT Services to back up its supported servers (it is often used a data recovery tool of last resort because of the time required to restore from tape). TSM's data transfer method is to use the operating system client to periodically transmit new data.
A more popular method that is beginning to replace TSM is disk-to-disk replication. The production copy needs to be stored on IT Services Tier 2, LCCS (Low Cost Central Storage), or ULCCS (Ultra Low Cost Central Storage) using NetApp storage systems, and data is replicated from one primary system to two secondary systems one to six times a day. Geodiversity of storage is provided through the auxiliary data center in Livermore.
Data protection for desktops and some servers are delivered by Iron Mountain Connected, MozyPro and CrashPlan. For small data sets (or ones with low daily change), external service providers can offer inexpensive alternatives to an internal system when the bandwidth throughput and latency between the client and the service is not an issue.
Individual schools, departments, and even IT Services' services have moved away from TSM for cost and transparency reasons. Lowering the rate and improving reporting should help address this issue.
