The Institute of Chemical Technology, Prague, Chooses Proact

Proact It Group made the migration to a new storage system during full operation.

The Institute of Chemical Technology, Prague is the largest
educational institute of its kind in central and Eastern Europe. It follows the
almost 200 year tradition of chemical technology education in the country.

The IT department of the Institute of Chemical Technology needed to
solve the problem of ending support for an existing central storage system and
build new storage architecture, an HA solution without
downtime due to maintenance. The system should be used by roughly 4,000
students and 500 researchers.

The most favourable solution from both a technological and economic
perspective proved to be a solution designed by Proact based on a metrocluster
with flash cache accelerators spread across two datacentres.

The solution replaced several file servers and applications running
on MS SQL, VMware and Oracle and was supplemented by SnapManager for management
of backup and recovery funds directly to the disk system. The SnapManager make
it possible to conduct low-capacity and application-consistent snapshots
without impacting the performance.

In addition to data protection, this is also used to create flexible
clones and for testing purposes, without the need for additional space. Beyond
SnapManager, the Exchange infrastructure has been supplemented by
tools for single mailbox recovery directly from write-activated snapshots. All
data and snapshots are consequently backed up to a tape
library at a different location.

Migration between the original and new storage system was conducted
during full operation with minimal effects on the user and the availability of
the services being operated.