Advanced Motors & Drives Replaces Tape-Based Backup With StorTrends SAN

StorTrends, division of American Megatrends, Inc.,announced that Advanced Motors and Drives (AMD), a designer and manufacturer of customized motors for battery-powered vehicles and a part of Nidec Corporation, has deployed a StorTrends SAN across its primary and remote backup datacenters to support its growth and evolving product line.

In addition to serving industrial, recreational and utility vehicle manufacturers, AMD is also on the cutting edge of clean ‘green’ motor manufacturing. Staffed by a team of hundreds of designers, engineers, IT professionals and administrative staff, its upstate New York design and manufacturing facilities are supported by a primary and remote datacenter.

The datacenters utilize a range of enterprise applications, across a heterogeneous infrastructure made up of Red Hat Linux servers, a Blackberry Enterprise sever, and various IBM servers. In addition, AMD relies on Windows-compatible Samba to help support and manage its end user desktop, laptop and printer environment. Until the StorTrends SAN deployment, AMD had relied almost exclusively on tape-based backup. However, as AMD continued to grow it recognized that not only was tape backup a resource draining process, they also faced the risk that if they should experience an outage or disaster event, their information and applications would be unavailable for an unacceptable period of time, if not lost forever.

“The tape backup approach became a bottleneck, so we created a rotating schedule to backup different applications on different days. But, this led to periods of time when no backups existed for some apps,” explained Tom Flood, IT manager, AMD.

To augment, disk-based backup was also used but not moved to a safe location until the tape backup was moved. Restoration was complicated and time consuming, and consequently avoided whenever possible. As this was not a long-term tenable solution, given the company growth and business criticality of applications and information, Flood began the search for a technologically viable solution, which would also meet its stringent budget requirements. After a review of available solutions, and an executed performance proof of concept (POC), Flood chose and deployed a StorTrends SAN across its primary and remote datacenters.

“StorTrends, with its easy and intuitive GUI, makes SAN deployment and management really simple – we had it up and running in about 15mn ,” said Flood. “You don’t need a special degree to create volumes in StorTrends. It’s completed in just a few clicks. And, with a few more clicks, you’ve got that same volume replicated safely offsite.“

AMD has six volumes thin provisioned (StorTrends allows for both thin and exact) for a capacity of over 3.5TB. Each StorTrends has useable 11TB capacity, including a hot spare drive. Data is replicated every day, with StorTrends Snap-Assisted Replication (SAR) feature – where an original point-in-time copy of data is replicated. After which, only changed data is captured and replicated in order to expedite the backup process, reduce performance overhead, and eliminate backup storage redundancy.

“Whereas previously backup was a tedious chore that was time intensive, expensive, and less than reliable, StorTrends has provided AMD with a high performance solution for fast and consistent backup, at a dramatically lower cost. For instance, a pdf directory of thousands of product drawings now takes just a couples to be fully backed up – with future backups consisting of only the changes to these files,” said Justin Bagby, director, StorTrends division, American Megatrends. “Moreover, StorTrends has provided AMD with the flexibility to grow its storage environment how and when it needs to, whether they require all-flash, hybrid flash or spinning disk to support their application and budgetary requirements.“