S2|DATA’S ROLE: Allow customer to retire their legacy Veritas NetBackup envrionment, leverage S2|DATA’s secure the customer’s backup tapes in S2|DATA’s Intelligent Tape Archive, while also giving the customer access to legacy data.
A large US insurance company came to S2|DATA with a relatively common situation. They had transitioned away from a comprehensive Veritas NetBackup environment that created backups and archives for all their major server environments. The environment hosted multiple Microsoft Exchange Servers and a variety of large database driven applications and NDMP data.
The mix was further complicated by client records organized by data class across the threaded tape sets, making it very difficult to purge data no longer needed without full use of the existing environment, which included multiple i6000 Quantum tape libraries hosting a variety of LTO tape drive versions from LTO2 to LTO6.
Though the company was no longer creating new data within the Veritas Netbackup environment due to occasional legal requests, compliance audits and pro-active remediation of data, they had to retain the complete environment. This included space, staffing and other support utility costs, in addition to software and hardware licensing and support.
Organizing the Data
S2|DATA took receipt of the company’s 4,500 LTO backup tapes into its Intelligent Archives at its HAV (High Availability Vault) in Atlanta. Here the tapes were scanned for session level information, catalog level data and mailbox listings using TRACS (similar outcome to Phase 1 and Phase 2 Netbackup imports but with greater depth of metadata), with real-time export to Invenire™ on AWS.
This enabled full control over the legacy archived data without the need for the old Veritas Netbackup managed infrastructure. The Intelligent Tape Archive further consolidated tape quantities by separating key target data class with TRACS/TSF (Tape Session File) to make future data remediations simple and fast.
Reducing Risk and Overhead
The insurance company was able to immediately retire their complete legacy environment. This included software licensing, hardware support contracts, NetApp NAS servers and storage. They were also able to lower costs by labor redeployment and utility cost reductions. However, the real win for the company was the reduction of risk by using Invenire™ to enable the deletion of data by class and the retention schedule on-demand.
The Intelligent Tape Archive
The Intelligent Tape Archive (ITA) is a suite of highly innovative managed services from a single location that enable intelligent layers of interrogative data insight over the archived tape. Before the ITA, data insight was possible only from the original backup environment infrastructure.
Once the tapes are moved to the High Availability Vault (HAV), the owners can start to retire costs, eliminate risk and speed up time to data, through a single cloud-based portal known as “Invenire™”, which hosts only the metadata.
The concept is simple. S2|DATA removes all the headaches, costs and complexities surrounding the removal of legacy data environments. We offer all this for a single monthly per-tape storage fee, while providing a full suite of managed services to react to data requests for compliance, business or litigation reasons.
About S2|DATA
Discover more about our suite of related services here.
