Centro de Informática e Automação do Estado de Santa Catarina in Brazil Invests 7 Million Brazilian Reais

The CIASC (Centro de Informática e Automação do Estado de Santa Catarina), the public technology company of the state of Santa Catarina, has invested 7 million Brazilian reais in a project aimed at improving data backup.

The project, implemented by ZOOMtecnologia and featuring global brands Commvault Systems, Inc. and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., is part of CIASC’s efforts to promote digital transformation in the government sector and enhance the lives of 7.6 million citizens in Santa Catarina and neighboring municipalities.

CIASC is divided into 4 areas:

• Government Network, which manages data traffic and provides high-speed network services to public institutions in the state;
• Cloud and Data Center Infrastructure, which stores and processes critical government systems and databases with utmost security and control;
• Software and Platforms, which offers computational systems and digital services to facilitate citizen experiences across various sectors; and
• Data Intelligence, which analyzes real-time data from different government agencies to assist in public administration decision-making.

To comply with the requirements of the LGPD (General Data Protection Law), CIASC has been focusing on data protection, particularly for government departments and public organizations that handle critical and important taxpayer information. As part of its infrastructure upgrade project initiated in 2021 and completed in 2022, it has expanded its storage system capacity by 60%, with an investment of approximately 5 million reais in the backup project and an additional 2 million reais for storage expansion. The company now has an additional 600TB available in its data center, with a total capacity of 1.5PB.

These investments have provided improved data protection and security for the data center and also enhanced performance, processing speed, and information access. Additionally, the new solution has reduced physical space requirements, resulting in lower electricity consumption.

ZOOMtecnologia, the systems integrator responsible for implementing the project, recommended the solutions from Commvault and Huawei. Commvault was chosen for its advanced data management technology, which includes functionalities that detect and protect against ransomware attacks, as well as identify backup anomalies and promptly alert potential risks.

The previous backup system has been replaced with the Commvault software platform and a Huawei OceanStor 5300 V5 hybrid storage with 1PB of net capacity.

Rodrigo Santos, operations director, ZOOMtecnologia, explains that this configuration enables automated local disk backups and optimized secondary copy transfers to the cloud, providing HA, scalability, flexibility, and enhanced data security. Currently, CIASC protects 3,000 VMs and a total volume of 1PB of production data, with 24-hour technical support from the systems integrator, 7 days a week.

The new solution has brought several practical benefits to the internal CIASC clients, including agility through “self-service” operations, allowing authorized users to manage their own data directly through the simplified Commvault platform, enabling file and folder backups and restorations. The solution also allows control over the volume of data (in gigabytes) occupied by backups.

Due to the substantial growth in relational and non-relational database storage, as well as other types of data (documents, videos, images, etc.), CIASC plans to make additional acquisitions. These can be better stored and retrieved using an object storage system, simplifying storage processes.

Marcel Vilmar da Silva, CIASC’s data protection officer, highlights that the recommended solution, with the combination of Commvault’s data management and protection technology and Huawei’s expertise, has contributed to the development of new projects. One such project is CIASC Eternal, a service package that covers content digitization, online and offline data storage, and large file access and management. The technology behind CIASC Eternal is designed to guarantee the integrity of stored information for over a thousand years.

Marcelo Rodrigues, general director, Commvault Brazil, expresses the satisfaction of protecting and managing the data of Santa Catarina’s citizens through CIASC and ZOOMtecnologia partnership. He emphasizes the increasing need of companies to intelligently manage all their data and further supports their evolution.