A
Cambridge University research laboratory has reduced the time
it takes to back up over 23 terabytes of data from seven days to
two, as part of an £80,000 overhaul of its
storage area network (SAN).
The Juvenile Diabetes Research
Foundation (JDRF), which works towards finding a cure for
diabetes in young children, found that its previous set-up of a SAN
and
tape library lacked the capacity and management functions for
reliably archiving the large amounts of data created by its
research activities.
As part of upgrading its storage system, the foundation has
spent £10,000 on software from
Bakbone to automate much of the administrative tasks involved
with carrying out and verifying the back-up process.
Over the past three years the amount of data which the facility
processed had risen by 3 terabytes and staff had noticed that
back-up times were increasing to the point where jobs were not
completing successfully, thereby placing sensitive data at
risk.
Furthermore, back-up jobs had to be carried out and audited
manually, which tied up IT staff in maintenance rather than on more
productive development work.
“If we did not address the deteriorating quality of our storage
set-up as soon as we did, we would have been unable to continue
research – it is as simple as that,” said systems manager Vin
Everett.
The foundation spent two months appraising the software to
ensure it could handle the large volumes of data. According to
Everett, this was an upgrade it could only carry out once because
of a limited budget, and so stress-testing the application
beforehand was essential to keeping a cap on revision costs.
“If this installation went wrong, and we had to fix something
later on, it would have eaten into the main research budget and
compromised the quality of work we carry out here”
Everett expects data volumes to continue to rise and that the
next challenge will involve securing the data when transferring and
backing up data between external partners. “We exchange a lot of
our data with the Sanger institute and part of our future plans
involve establishing
secure shell (SSH) connections and using R-sync technology to
verify that large terabyte transfers are successful,” he said.
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