University of St. Thomas Dedups With Quantum

Quantum Corp. announced that the University of St. Thomas has become the latest
organization to realize significant benefits by utilizing Quantum’s DXi
disk backup and replication appliance with data de-duplication technology. In
the months since implementing the solution the University has reduced data
center disk space required for backups by 90 percent, cut their previous
backup window in half, re-directed their Quantum Scalar(R) tape library
infrastructure for long-term archive and disaster recovery purposes,
eliminated failed backup jobs, and significantly reduced administrative time
and cost.

"I don’t get any more phone calls in the middle of the night telling me
that our backups failed," said Laura Thomas, server administrator for
University of St. Thomas. "I don’t think about backups anymore because the
Quantum DXi3500 with its data de-duplication has eliminated these thoughts
from my mind."

Established in 1885, St. Thomas is an independent Catholic liberal arts
university with its main campus in St. Paul, Minnesota. Over the last three
decades the University has gone co-ed, added 46 graduate programs, quadrupled
its enrollment and opened three branch campuses.

The University has 30 people in its IT department to provide services to
its 15,000 full-time students and 2,000 staff. There is a mix of nearly 200
Windows and UNIX servers running more than sixty applications at the
University’s two data centers, one at the St. Paul campus, and the other
across the river at the downtown Minneapolis campus.

University of St. Thomas performs 20 TB full backups over the weekends,
supplemented by daily 1 TB incremental backups. They had been using a Quantum
Scalar i2000 enterprise tape library in St. Paul and a small autoloader in
Minneapolis. As the quantity of stored data continued to rise, St. Thomas
started using a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup. This proved to be only a
temporary solution.

"We were using raw SAN disk for disk-to-disk staging," said Thomas. "It
had become increasingly slow as it got more fragmented, and it wouldn’t clean
itself very well." Eventually it got to the point where backups started at 6
or 7 p.m. and would still be running at the start of the next business day.
Even worse were the frequent failures.

"Every night, I’d log into the system from home to make sure I had enough
tape and enough space cleared on the SAN so the backups would run," said
Thomas. "It was a constant juggling act. We needed to do something to shorten
our backup windows and make everything more reliable and more robust, so we
began looking for solutions with more throughput and capacity."

This led the University to start looking at options for upgrading its
backup systems. "Since we already had a Quantum tape library and we loved it,
we were looking to replace it with a similar library," said Thomas.

Although Thomas began this project comparing tape libraries, she liked the
disk and tape solution Quantum offered, which would help her increase
performance and shorten her backup windows. "We were very happy with our
previous experience with the Quantum libraries. They were super reliable and
the support on them was awesome. The Quantum DXi appliance was really
interesting the way it worked like a virtual tape library, and didn’t require
special backup software or load agents anywhere. It just acts like a tape
library, runs like a library, and works great that way."

University of St. Thomas purchased a 1.2 TB Quantum DXi3500 disk backup
and remote replication appliance with data de-duplication technology and a
Quantum Scalar i2000 tape library with six LTO-3 drives for the St. Paul
campus, and a Quantum Scalar i500 tape library with two LTO-3 drives for the
Minneapolis campus.

Installation of the Quantum equipment was easy — with all three systems
going live in less than one day. "From the moment we started setting up the
DXi3500 to when we streamed backups to it was under one hour," said Thomas.

The DXi appliance is connected to the same Fibre Channel fabric that
connects all the tape libraries and servers. Disk backup is used for short
term storage, typically two weeks or less, before it is streamed to tape and
sent to offsite storage. Given the additional capacity of the DXi system
provided by the data de-duplication feature, the university runs additional
servers to it and then duplicates from the DXi3500 to tape. Since the daily
incrementals run around 1 TB, and the DXi3500 has 1.2 TB capacity, the
University of St. Thomas uses the built-in data de-duplication technology.

"Currently, we are seeing about 10:1 on our data de-duplication ratio, but
I expect to see that improve as I get more data going to the DXi3500," said
Thomas. She streams the data from a number of the slower performing servers to
back up the DXi appliance over a single connection which has greatly reduced
the time needed for the backup from 10 hours to just five. Equally important
has been the reliability and ease of administration.

When asked about future plans for the Quantum solution, Thomas says she
would like to get a DXi5500 for the larger St. Paul data center and move the
DXi3500 to the Minneapolis data center. She also would like to run more
backups to the DXi-Series in general and have fewer backups to tape.

"Our data grows on average about 30 percent a year, so I’d like to use
Quantum’s DXi-Series to help buffer the growth versus the tape libraries,"
said Thomas. "I’d also use it to replicate our enterprise data, ERP data, from
St. Paul direct to Minneapolis using the replication feature between the two
DXi systems."

University of St. Thomas

Quantum Corp.