Luton Borough Council Operates Two Sepaton VTLs With Symantec NetBackup

SEPATON, Inc. announced that Luton Borough Council has achieved scalability gains to manage 20 percent year-over-year data growth, while slashing backup times using SEPATON  S2100-ES2 data protection appliance and DeltaStor data deduplication software. Luton BC has continued to extend its investment in SEPATON across its primary data center to a secondary data recovery site.
 

 
Luton Borough Council is the unitary authority that provides all local government functions and services for the 230,000 residents of the Bedfordshire town of Luton and its immediate surrounding area. The council administration is spread across half a dozen sites within this small geographical area, with a data center facility split across two town center locations.
 
Luton Borough Council was one of the very earliest public sector adopters of SEPATON virtual tape library and deduplication technology in the UK. The decision was made to meet the need for an efficient solution for data backup and recovery when the volume of data being managed by the council’s Information Management team was making pure physical tape backups too lengthy and impractical. As data expanded, full backups started to exceed full weekend windows, while incremental backups towards the end of the working week were running over night and into the following day.
 
"I’ve always liked the concept of SEPATON’s holistic approach which comprises hardware, software and vendor support," explained Geoff Evans, technical services manager for Luton BC. "I enjoy dealing directly with technology providers and SEPATON’s method for backup coupled with data deduplication proved extremely quick. The VTL element effectively gave us the power of dozens of tape drives, because suddenly we could think about backing up ten or 20 servers concurrently, making an enormous impact on our backup windows."
 
Luton BC now operates two S2100-ES VTLs with DeltaStor data deduplication and Symantec NetBackup. The first is installed at a primary site in the Town Hall with 20 terabytes total capacity and the second is in a backup site connected with a single network fabric. Local data copies are retained for up to a month for on-the-fly restores, while physical tapes are stored periodically offsite
 
"It’s extremely satisfying that one of our earliest technology adopters in the UK remains so supportive of SEPATON technology that it continues to evolve its infrastructure by deploying the latest versions of our appliances and data deduplication software," said Jon Mills, EMEA managing director for SEPATON. "The results of Luton Borough Council’s SEPATON implementation speak for themselves: backups that were struggling to fit into a full weekend are now started and completed every Sunday; data deduplication ratios range from 16:1 on documents to 30:1 on structured databases and upwards of 50:1 on MS Exchange data; while SEPATON continues to help the council cope with an estimated 20 percent data expansion year-on-year."
 
Luton BC is already considering the role of DeltaStor in the replication and migration of data in a possible move of one of its data centers to a more remote geographically redundant location in the near future.