Windows NT and 2000 explorer’s Andy O’Brien (Exp) spoke to Danny Hulligan (DH), Security Co-ordinator at Swiss Life, about the ATL 7100 library and the difference it has made to Swiss Life’s ability to ensure secure access to its systems.

Exp: What does the ATL 7100 do for your company?

DH: It provides on-line access to recent copies (back-ups) for up to ten working days worth of history as well as enabling us to carry out essential back-ups on a daily basis. It also lets us create copies of those backups which can then be stored off site. This work is carried out during normal working hours and is automated, therefore limiting the amount of ‘operator’ interaction. Before the ATL and Legato Networker software we had to have a huge number of drives per server, the HP DAT drives were reliable but numerous and caused an administrative nightmare for normal or disaster recovery. NT had used various equipment and software over the past five years but was ‘standardising’ on DLT. The problem was that first it was DLT2000, and then DLT4000 using standalone machines, or as the number of NT servers grew, dual drive machines. The tendency was to buy more drives as we bought more servers and this was getting out of hand.

Exp: How do you manage the ATL solution?

DH: The ability to deal with just one device (although currently with three drives) is a major benefit. When we had numerous DAT and DLT drives creating many backup tapes it often took a full day to administer each previous day’s back-up and copies. Now one person can administer the lot in a couple of hours as everything can be automated, the pre-arranged jobs need tapes to be removed or added as required. This leaves people to get on with other work. The ATL is ‘driven’ by an HP Unix box – it’s the back-up software that deals with the fact that we run Unix and NT. The ATL simply writes the back-up data presented to it by the HP back-up server and doesn’t care whether it came from an NT or an HP box.

Exp: How will this implementation facilitate future projects?

DH: It has given us the confidence that as we add more and more storage, our ability to back it up will be there. It’s true that in the short term we might reduce the number of days worth of on-line copies, but we can add up to four more drives to the ATL, thereby at least doubling our current backup capability. One example of new development is our DIP equipment. Before committing to Optical, the DIP server will at any one time have many gigabytes of cached images to back up every day. Our ATL can cope with this with its current configuration and if not, we simply add additional drives. When we were looking for a new solution, we did try to take growth into consideration and at the time, we felt that our figures were a little over the top. Experience has shown us that we had, in fact, underestimated what level of storage we might get to in the timescale originally envisaged. The solution has so far coped and we are confident that it will deal with further expansion for some time yet.

Exp: And so to sum up, what are your overall impressions of the ATL 7100 library?

DH: We liked the ATL because it offered a cost effective unit which fitted our requirements – scalable as far as slots and drives go and also fast. It does have some mechanical problems, for example when tapes get stuck in the gripper, but as yet, these are not seen as dangerous to the efficiency of our back-up schedule. We may possibly have been wiser to use a different Unix host but preferred to keep our Unix systems under one version. My own personal belief is that Swiss Life must look at the storage concept and try to centralise it rather than have individual servers all handling their own number of disc drives etc. In this way we would be able to have duplicated storage centres – images of each other, with back-up solutions, like our ATL, taking full dumps of one at pre-determined times. I feel that at some time we must recognise requirements for archiving and HSM, particularly as storage will grow and grow.

In the pipeline

To date, the emphasis for Hulligan’s department has been to develop a solution for the Client Service Centre at Liverpool. That focus has now moved to the head office in Sevenoaks where an ATL P1000, with 3 DLT7000 drives and 16 slots has recently been installed. This is expected to bring the same benefits (admin, automatic cloning etc) as the Liverpool office. It is unlikely to be extended to the branch offices as they are too small. Other changes will be influenced by the Internet where e-commerce will undoubtedly create a need for secure all year round access to Swiss life’s systems. Resilience of the systems supporting e-commerce will be critical – and this will certainly include data backup.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]