HPE P9G69A Product Data Sheet
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.
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