Giving Post room to grow
Giving Post room to grow
Australia Post's Sydney processing facility is gaining room to breathe with a Storage Area Network.
Australia Post is poised to realise new capacities at its Strathfield West letter processing facility, with the rollout of a new backup and recovery solution.
When the facility processed more than 60 million pre-coded leters last Christmas, Post saw the facility would need the bandwidth to handle this kind of load normally, and to prepare it for what would become a greater load this Christmas.
To better use the capacity of its network and expand with its growing needs, Post began implementing a Storage Area Network (SAN)-based backup strategy six months ago, a project it is continuing to gradually roll out.
The SAN-based backup allows central control over servers, said Australia Post's Sachin Rastogi.
Post opted to invest in a SAN solution as this would allow the tape library to be shared across multiple servers and increase access to stored data. The facility could also improve performance by connecting the library directly to the servers and avoiding backup over the user Local Area Network (LAN), and introduce failover capabilities for disaster recovery, said Sachin Rastogi, helpdesk IT support at the Strathfield base.
The SAN also permits a more flexible configuration, so the system's capacity can grow.
The Post facility has undertaken the project with local systems integrator Dawn Technologies, which falls under the umbrella of storage management solutions provider e-DataGroup. The solution will allow Post's multiple backup servers to share common storage devices, while also giving it the room to expand with its data storage requirements.
The backup strategy consists of a full backup of each server which is taken every night, before the tape media is stored off site, said Mr Rastogi. The facility currently has a total data load of 100GB.
The solution comprises eight Compaq ProLiant rackmounted servers running Windows NT. Three of these act as backup servers as well as production servers while the other five are file and print servers that are backed up over the network. Each of the servers also has in built Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID), to provide redundancy and disaster recovery.
Each backup server operates independently, however they share an automated ADIC Scalar 1000 robotic tape library with four DLT 7000 tape drives and 118 cartridge slots. This provides around four terabytes of native storage capacity.
The servers are connected within the SAN through a fibre channel fabric, which uses Ancor switches and Emulex hubs and cards.
ROOM TO MOVE
Australia Post has installed Veritas Backup Exec Enterprise for NT with a Shared Storage Option (SSO) on all of its application servers. This management software enables the SAN to operate as the library can be shared multiple servers over the dedicated network.
SSO allows multiple Backup Exec servers to share secondary storage devices, such as Post's tape libraries, within the SAN.
To allow the Backup Exec servers to share storage devices and media, a shared Advanced Device and Media management database resides on one server, called the database server within Post's network. All servers connect to this to see a unified view of the storage setup, and it acts as the point of control by arbitrating all device and media requests.
"The system is fully programmable, and has been designed so that it works automatically so that we don't have to interfere," said Mr Rastogi.
At the moment, Post's total storage is between 50GB and 70GB, however it has room to expand to 600GB before it has to expand its current setup. The actual backup reaches speeds of up to 1GB per minute.
As well as this considerable room to grow, Post has also protected its SAN by maintaining a 'swap-ready' server configured and installed with software, so that it can be ready to replace a failed server in the event of disaster.
All four tape drives also remain ready for the servers at any time, so that backup jobs can begin as soon as possible each session, and so that if one drive fails, another is ready to complete the backup. "It's important that we don't have to worry about the backups," said Mr Rastogi.