Arup, the global engineering firm behind Terminal 5 and the
Bejing Olympic stadium, has implemented a disc-based back-up system
from Copan, to reduce its data centre power consumption.
Steven Capper, Arup Europe region IT leader, said, "Power is an
issue in our server rooms. We are spending £200,000 a year on
power. Our uninterruptable power supplies are running at 98%
capacity. We needed to do something to reduce our power usage in
the data centre" Using the Copan product he said, Arup can reduce
the power required in backing up data to discs.
The Copan
system work by only powering disc drives up when requested by
the application. The system will reduces Arup's power and cooling
costs by at least 85%, according to Copan, represening savings of
$26,000 on power and cooling over three years.
Green storage is now on the radar of IT managers struggling to
gain greater power efficiencies in the data centre. The more data
stored online in a data centre, the more discs that are required,
which means power consumption increases. Greater storage also means
more data needs to be backed up on a daily basis. Arup found that
it was unable to back all its data to tape during its backup
windows which ran from 7pm to 8am UK time. Capper said, "The
back-up was not finishing by 8am. Which prevented access to
Microsoft Exchange in our Dubai office."
He installed Copan's
virtual
tape library to overcome the back-up problems. Copan uses discs
configured as a massive array of idle discs (maid) instead of tape
for backup. Along with enabling Arup to complete backup's in the
allotted time, the Copan product has also reduced the company's
data centre power requirements.