Backing up in harmony
Backing up in harmony
Solving the time-sensitive data management issues of a music industry giant.
EMI Music is one of the world's largest record companies, operating in nearly 70 countries and employing 8,000 people. Founded in London in 1897, EMI's current roster of recording labels includes Capitol, Chrysalis and Virgin.
EMI Music Australia (EMI) has branches in the major population centres of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, producing and distributing music by Australian artists such as Nick Cave, Silverchair and Kasey Chambers.
EMI has Windows 2000 as its operating system, with several critical business applications including Microsoft Exchange, Telnet, and a sales reporting and finance system which is based on Microsoft Great Plains.
"The sales reporting system is accessed by EMI personnel constantly, all over Australia. It records the daily sales history and maps everything that was sold in the previous day such as which record stores are buying which music and in what quantities," explains Nick Martin, IT team leader with EMI Music Australia.
The system is core to EMI Music's operations and is used by the finance department for general ledger information, the marketing department for forecasting and statistics and by the production people for demand planning.
Recently, the company decided to implement a new system to take care of its backup requirements, as it could foresee that its previous Computer Associates ARCserve 2000 system would soon be unable to meet the demands imposed upon it by EMI.
EMI's critical systems need to be online until close of business in Perth, approximately 8pm (EST). At midnight, overnight processing is then initiated to generate the next day's data. This leaves only four hours, between 8pm and midnight, for EMI Music's data backup, which is where its main problem lay.
"Speed was the major business challenge we faced when looking for a new backup system," says Martin. "Our CA ARCserve 2000 system had served us well for a number of years, but we were looking for something faster. We were coming close to exceeding the allowable overnight backup window and needed a system that would decrease backup times."
Other selection criteria included reliability, compatibility with existing hardware, and of course, cost.
Ultimately, it was CA that won through once again, with EMI opting for its BrightStor Enterprise Backup (BEB) system.
Martin says EMI was rather taken aback when exploring its options at the lack of compatibility within other offerings in the market, which made its choice that bit easier. "As well as evaluating CA, we looked at the leading competitor's offerings.
Surprisingly, the other products were not compatible with a large number of our existing backup devices and would have required replacing multiple tape drives.
"We were using quite standard SCSI interfaces from Compaq and Adaptec with well known brands of tape drives such as Sony and Quantum, all of which worked on ARCserve 2000 and continue to work with BrightStor. The competitor initially claimed that their software would work with anything that had an ASPI driver, but after some searching on their own website and putting their technical support on the spot, the other vendor had to admit they could only guarantee to support one of our tape drives and recommended that we replace about $30K of hardware.
At the time, I concluded that Brightstor was compatible with a wider range of hardware that their competitor and we would be less locked in to a proprietary system. The costs of moving to a competitor's products would have been almost triple the cost of moving to BrightStor Enterprise Backup," says Martin.
EMI has 100 users in Australia, 22 servers running BEB and three BEB engines. The company performs differential back ups during the week of between 100 and 150 Gigabytes of data in a four hour window. On a full backup, which starts on Friday evening and runs till early afternoon on Saturday, EMI backs up 1.5 Terabytes of data using BEB.
"(BEB) recognised all our existing hardware well. On some of our systems we are now backing up two to three times faster than we did before," beams Martin.
And in the unlikely event that any part of the system fall down, safeguards are in place to ensure that martin and his team can still sleep soundly, as he explains.
"Being mostly SQL-based, our applications keep working whether the backups are successful or not, and the BrightStor agents have been very reliable. For extra data protection, we use spare capacity on independent tape systems to make secondary backups of critical data.
This is made easier by the extra speed and compression in BrightStor. The excellent reporting in the manager interface makes it possible to quickly find and fix any problems."
BrightStor Enterprise Backup has also delivered savings on backup tapes for EMI, adds Martin.
"BEB's compression technology is highly effective and we can now fit more information on the same number of tapes, leading to a saving of 10 percent. For a large organisation such as EMI, this delivers substantial bottom-line benefits."
What this represents in dollar terms is not as easy to determine, but as Martin attests, while the costs savings are welcome, that is not the most appealing aspect of the technology.
"We use high capacity tapes and many jobs take only one tape so there is no saving if the tape is half full or three quarters full. There would be several thousand dollars saved on the weekly backup that run over multiple tapes. For EMI, the advantage of the extra compression is speed and this has at least a theoretical saving as we need less tape drives running to achieve the backups in the time allowed.
"Relatively easy to configure and requiring minimal tweaking, BEB's user interface is quite intuitive and well structured. (Its) report features make it easy to review information and job status and the BrightStor agents for Microsoft Exchange and SQL server provide valuable features such as live data backup, detailed logs, Exchange brick level backup and higher backup speeds."
Martin also found BrightStor Enterprise Backup uses the capabilities of backup hardware more efficiently.
"BrightStor Enterprise Backup has more intelligent handling of tape libraries. With our previous system, we could only do one operation on a tape library at a time. With BEB, we can do more than one operation such as erase and view at the same time. This lets my team conduct operations more quickly."
And how does EMI plan to further utilise BrighStor in the months ahead? Martin concludes: "Looking forward, EMI plans to implement BrightStor Portal to provide an all-in-one interface for all our tape engines. This will enable us to view all our systems at a national level and will provide centralised, comprehensive visibility of all storage information across all vendor products."
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