Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack provides Data Storage Solutions for the Department of State

http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr-fastback-center/?cmp=...

Peter Stark, Executive director of ManTech International.

Transcript

My name is Peter Stark, I work for ManTech International, my title is Executive Director.

ManTech International is under contract to the United States Department of State to provide what we refer to as global IT modernization, of all of the Department of State's information systems around the world.

The department operates two physically separate networks around the world for classified and unclassified data.

The department operates both networks in 250 locations around the world, each of them with a minimum of 5 and sometimes as many as 15 or 20 servers, so in total between the two networks, you're looking at nearly 3,000 servers spread around the world.

When we first were presented with the need to implement a solution to our worldwide backup problem, we had a very heterogenous backup environment around the world. In some cases that meant that there was no backup being done of some systems, in other cases it meant they were using one system for one type of server and another system for another and depending on which one had worked most recently sometimes you didn't have a backup.

In some cases the backups were taking an incredibly long time because they had quite a lot of data on a server. We had an Exchange server in the first pilot post that we deployed to that was taking 46 hours to backup, we could only do it once a week over a weekend and if you ever wanted to recover anything it would take you just as long to copy the data back from the backup tapes if it had worked in order to recover simple objects.

When we went in and implemented the FastBack solution in the same post, we were able to then get eight snapshots a day from the Exchange server each of which was only taking two or three minutes to run and we've been able to recover objects in 5 or 10 minutes whereas previously it was just not feasible with a 46 hour backup and recovery time.

For us, I think that a smart business or a smart organization is one that is trying to reduce the amount of time that it takes for someone to try to do routine administration on their systems. The more that you can provide people a mechanism for being able to protect their systems and operate their systems, that doesn't require a lot of their time, the more efficient it is, the fewer resources are required to maintain it, and the better the system will work.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Tivoli FastBack Solution
• Data Storage Solution
• application Security
• Continuous Data Protection
• Department of State