Objective
Safeguard critical data and eliminate
wasted time by implementing a new
backup solution
Approach
Contacted its existing provider
HPE and decided on a Virtual
Tape Library solution following
extensive consultations and product
demonstrations
Case Study
whg safeguards data
with reliable backup
HPE StoreOnce Backup uses deduplication to
extend retention from three weeks to six months
IT Matters
• Uses deduplication technology to
achieve a data consolidation rate
of 16:1
• Delivers backup speeds of up to
7GB per minute
• Increases backup period from three
weeks to six months
Business Matters
• Eliminates routine troubleshooting,
freeing IT sta for more business
critical work
• Provides reliable backup of business
critical data
• Reduces expenditure on disks, energy,
space and cooling
Growing data volumes and
ageing backup systems were
a challenge for leading
Midlands housing provider
whg. Capacity was insuicient
and sta spent too much
time troubleshooting
the failing systems. The
organisation needed a new
and more reliable backup
solution and found the
answer with HPE StoreOnce
Backup and HPE StoreEver
Tape Libraries.
Challenge
Daily problems
Changes in the provision of social housing
have seen most of the UK’s council-owned
properties transferred to non-profit housing
associations and whg was formed in 2003
following such a transfer from Walsall
Council. Having invested more than
£350 million in the 19,000 properties it owns
and manages, whg is now one of the largest
and most successful housing providers in
the West Midlands area. It houses 40,000
people who make up one fifth of the
local population.
whg’s 19-strong IT team is divided into three
groups who provide first line, system and
technical support for 700 employees with
600 devices and are also responsible
for the production and disaster recovery
data centres.
Case study
whg
Industry
Housing
“The peace of mind, reliability and trust we have in the HPE StoreOnce
Backup has really revolutionised the way we do our backups.”
— Andrew Fox, IS technical architect, whg
Page 2
The organisation is a long-time customer
of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, starting
with ProLiant DL servers and recently
moving to high density HPE c7000 chassis
with BL460C blade servers. Its storage
infrastructure was founded on an
HPE StorageWorks EVA 4400 disk array
and when demand increased, a further
EVA 6550 array was added.
whg implemented VMware virtualisation five
years ago to cope with a growing number
of applications and to provide more virtual
machines for test and development. Now
the majority of systems are virtualised with
62 physical machines removed in a recent
recycling collection and another 25 due
to go soon.
“Eicient backup is vital to support the
file server, email servers, main corporate
systems, accounting systems and a
multitude of others. It includes the archiving
system which is growing considerably
because old paperwork for things like
tenancy agreements is being scanned and
stored on an archive server. For all of that,
we need about 15TB of backup capacity,”
says Andrew Fox, IS technical architect
at whg.
whg runs staged backups using CA Arcserve
software. Data is backed up to an HPE
ProLiant DL380 G7 server and when the
backup is finished, it’s migrated to two HPE
Storage MSL6060 tape libraries with a total
of eight HPE Ultrium LTO4 drives.
However, as data quantities increased and
the equipment got older, backup problems
started to occur resulting in extra work for
the IT sta.
Solution
Deduplication technology
Andrew’s first plan was to replace the
tape libraries with more up to date models
featuring LTO6 drives that are faster and
more reliable but HPE specialists suggested
Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL). They produced
a design based on the HPE StoreOnce
4420 Backup disk-based storage appliance,
backing o to a two-drive HPE Storage
MSL2024 Tape Library which gives whg the
ability to migrate certain jobs to physical
tape and have them taken o site.
It also provides the option to access data
on all archived backup tapes from a
compliance perspective.
HPE StoreOnce Backup systems are
designed to deliver daily onsite backup,
rapid data restore and reliable o site
disaster recovery. They feature HPE
deduplication technology which can reduce
the amount of backup data you need to
store by up to 95 per cent and can deliver
industry leading backup speeds of up to
100TB/hr.
“HPE provided a webinar overview of
the virtual tape library, gave us access to
HPE Labs and also sent in two technical
specialists to talk through the product,
demonstrate it and answer all our
questions,” says Andrew.
Case study
whg
Industry
Housing
Page 3
“However, what swung the deal for us was
that we were able to have the kit on loan for
up to three months.
“If you don’t like it HPE come and remove
the kit. If you do like it you just pay for it and
keep it. That was brilliant because I didn’t
want to go through the process of buying
something and then find it didn’t operate
in the way we wanted or was incompatible
with certain backup software. It shows HPE’s
confidence in its systems.”
HPE oered as much or as little support
as whg required so Andrew and the team
did the implementation themselves. It was
checked over by an HPE engineer and
signed o in two weeks. HPE provides
support with a nine to five next business
day callout.
Benefit
Reliability and speed
“One of the main things we were looking for
was reliability and HPE StoreOnce has just
not failed. It’s less mechanical so it’s writing
to hard drives and we’ve had no problems
with it whatsoever during the year we’ve
been using it,” says Andrew.
“The migrations just work and it’s saved
us so much time as well because we don’t
have to troubleshoot the migrations every
day. We were spending two hours a day on
troubleshooting and our other work was
getting delayed so it’s made us much more
eicient because we can trust it.
“We know that those migrations are going
to happen and that’s taken a weight o a lot
of peoples’ minds, particularly those running
our out of hours services. Now people have
been freed up to do other tasks.”
whg was creating so much data that even
with two huge libraries and over 100 tapes,
it only had the capacity to keep backups
for three weeks. With deduplication on
the virtual tape library it’s now achieving
a compression ratio of 16:1 which means
it can keep the backups for six months.
Deduplication also reduces the number of
disks required which reduces space, energy
and cooling costs.
Since the staged backup happens in the
background there is no impact on the
network so backup times are not an issue
for whg.
However, even with the added work of
deduplication, HPE StoreOnce 4420 is
delivering a transfer rate of up to 7GB/min.
As a not-for-profit organisation, whg has
so far not computed the amount of money
saved but eiciency and service standards
have certainly increased. Previously, if
someone lost a file it could take 10 minutes
to locate and load the appropriate tape.
Now, the restore time is around five seconds.
Scalability and compatibility are other
benefits as Andrew explains: “HPE
StoreOnce 4420 came with two additional
enclosures to put the drives in and you can
add another one.”
Case study
whg
Industry
Housing
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• HPE StoreOnce 4420 Backup
• HPE StoreEver MSL2024 Tape Library
HPE services
• HPE support with nine to five next
business day callout
“We now have a reliable and fast backup solution. The
recovery times are really quick and we are able to keep
backups for much longer.”
— Andrew Fox, IS technical architect, whg
“We ordered the additional enclosure,
it arrived, we racked it up, connected it
into the VTL and ran a command to say
‘recognise this enclosure - expand to this
enclosure’ and it just did it. You don’t lose
anything because the data that is on the
existing enclosures just spreads out across
the new enclosure.
“It also integrates very well with our backup
software. Creating a new VTL is very easy.
You just go into the system and create the
new library saying what kind of emulation
you want, how many drives and how many
tape cartridges and it creates it. It has a
whole range of emulation types and most
backup software will support one of the
emulations that HPE StoreOnce 4420
will use.”
Among many future plans, whg intends to
implement HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage
system and currently has this solution
on test.
“We want to use best practice and new
technologies and always work with HPE on
that,” concludes Andrew. “We’re told about
their roadmap for the future, HPE come
to visit us and we have conference calls,
presentations and demonstrations.
That is the kind of interaction we’re
getting with HPE.”
Learn more at
hpe.com/storage
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© Copyright 2015 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without
notice. The only warranties for HPE products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such
products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HPE shall not be liable for
technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
4AA5-6925EEW, November 2015, Rev. 1
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