Jukebox jury gives the blues top marks
Jukebox jury gives the blues top marks
Australia's Defence Force Credit Union (Defcredit) updates its BizeDocs document management system to great effect with the first HP next generation optical jukeboxes using blue ray technology to be implemented in Australia.
In October 2002 Defcredit, which as its name suggests, provides a range of financial services to Australia's Defence Force servicemen and women, made a decision to replace its existing electronic document management system. At that time it had already made a decision to move to a new banking system known as Phoenix. Defcredit required any new applications to meet its requirements for many years to ensure a good ROI and stability with applications at a time where technology changes so fast.
Defcredit selected BizeDocs, developed by Associated Computer Solutions (ACS) using the latest Microsoft .Net development environment. BizeDocs would not only integrate seamlessly with its new banking system, but also many of its other business applications. Business records today consist of many different pieces of information such as emails, phone calls, web pages, etc, that are produced from a wide variety of applications. All these types of business records can be managed with BizeDocs.
Another deciding factor in Defcredit's decision was the fact that it needed a fault tolerant system. For a financial institution with ATM's and credit cards, fraud is always a concern. Defcredit has a branch on nearly every Defence Force Base in Australia and it needed to be sure it could access its records quickly and easily from any location.
BizeDocs provided Defcredit with this capability. Defcredit has two BizeDocs sites-one in Adelaide and one in Melbourne-providing access to its documents nationally.
BizeDocs provides continuous replication of all documents between other BizeDocs sites, whether it is a disaster recovery site or another production site. DR sites can also be used as production servers. This keeps network traffic to a minimum, line costs low, performance high and response times fast in locations that have a large number of users. If a server is unavailable at a particular location, a change of URL has the organisation at that location back online.
BizeDocs requires minimal management. Emails are automatically generated to inform the support desk if a document misfiles or if an optical cartridge in a jukebox is nearly full or a mainframe spooler interface fails, etc.
BizeDocs has been installed and running successfully at Defcredit for more than a year now and they have found the number of documents being filed each month is increasing. Until recently, Defcredit only had optical storage in Melbourne so any document that existed only on the jukebox and no longer in the hard drive cache, was only accessible if the server with the jukebox was operational.
This situation prompted Defcredit to take action to remedy that particular problem, as Julie McNeil, manager of business systems at Defcredit explains. "The decision to go ahead with the implementation was made purely because our old system no longer had the capacity to meet our business needs. We already had a jukebox, but it was a smaller one, and we wanted something to take us through the next eight years or beyond if possible."
The implementation in question comprised two of HP recently-released jukebox range that uses the new blue laser technology to provide 30GB optical cartridges. Upon advice from ACS, Defcredit decided to place new HP Jukeboxes at its Melbourne and Adelaide sites. It purchased two 64 slot, four drive jukeboxes which provide nearly two Terabytes of data storage at each site.
This now means that the jukebox cartridges were automatically being backed up off site by the replicating site on a continuous basis. All documents, no matter how old, would always be available. Having four drives in each jukebox, there would be very few instances where there would not be a drive available to service a request. BizeDocs provides the ability to bias drives for reading or writing.
"We had the standard optical which was only in one location. This meant that everyone who needed to access documents from that jukebox had to come all across the network, which had some network implications as we have branches all around Australia, so they were taking bandwidth away from our other banking applications, explains McNeil.
The new system has put an end to this bottlenecking of the network, says McNeil."This way, by having a jukebox at two locations, there is no impact on data going right around the network when a branch decides it wants to access a particular file, and the four heads means it retrieves files so fast that there is no queuing of staff wanting to retrieve files.
"This blue ray technology provides us with far better storage and retrieval. As the project co-ordinator and a fairly heavy user, for me I am seeing the benefits from a retrieval point of view."
"Having more heads to read the data quicker; bigger opticals to be able to store more data without having to change them over constantly; and the ability to have one jukebox at each site so we could have a disaster recovery infrastructure in place," says McNeil of the new system's benefits.
Last month, another large financial institution, Members and Education Credit Union (mecu) that has also installed BizeDocs, made the same decision to install HP's new jukeboxes for the same reasons, installing the jukeboxes in Melbourne and Moe in Gippsland.
"With these new systems we are installing, having a jukebox at each end, with all the data being mirrored, company's are not at risk of losing valuable data if someone forgets to back up the cartridges," says ACS' Peter Norman. "Essentially, it is a great repository for storing all your documents. It is very versatile."
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