Department of Employment and Workplace Relations

Sun Brings Workplace Reform To DEWR Backups

Department Of Employment And Workplace Relations Achieves Faster Data Backups And Cuts Power Costs With Sun StorageTek Solution

The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) aims to maximise the ability of unemployed Australians to find work, support strong employment growth and participation and improve the productive performance of enterprises throughout Australia.

To achieve this, the Department uses advanced data backup technologies provided by Sun Microsystems to improve customer service expectations and to support Departmental Program delivery.

In order to cope with the rapid growth in data storage requirements as a result of government policy and new workplace reform initiatives, DEWR needed to increase the capacity of its existing backup infrastructure.

After thoroughly considering and examining available alternatives, the Department opted to enhance its existing Sun StorageTek mainframe and server tape backup infrastructure with the latest, current generation technology which delivered more storage space with greater performance and lower operating costs.

Working Together To Create New Mainframe Solution

The Department has used tape backup storage technology from StorageTek within the IT Facilities Branch since the early 1990s. Its two Canberra-based centres handle the data processing and storage requirements for all of DEWR's applications.

The majority of DEWR's tape backups, enterprise-wide, are handled by StorageTek technology. This backup technology ensures that data-based information is available to government and public users, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

DEWR decided to upgrade its tape backup system to ensure it could meet the IT Facilities Branch's projected natural growth. The Government's new 'Work Choices' and 'Welfare to Work' initiatives are also expected to increase data volumes, so the Department had to create capacity to store the additional information.

According to Tony Tyler, the Director of Data and Desktop Services at DEWR, the decision to stay with StorageTek year after year was made after careful consideration of available alternatives.

"DEWR has a strong tradition of looking over the horizon and embracing technological change whenever it is appropriate for us to do so," he said. "However, StorageTek's tape backup technology has consistently proved its worth to us and after careful and full analysis, we couldn't find a sustainable business case to move to another vendor."

The recent merger of Sun and StorageTek resulted in a fusion of technological expertise and service which has brought increased benefits to new and existing customers.

"Importantly from our perspective, this merger was a smooth transition. We were able to continue our good working relationship with the same StorageTek account manager and engineers with whom we had worked previously," said Tyler.

For the tape library technology refresh project, Tyler's team worked closely with Sun StorageTek to implement the enhanced tape backup system.

State-Of-The-Art Sun StorageTek Library System

The powerful Sun StorageTek StreamLine SL8500 modular library systems, which replaced an existing Powderhorn silo at each site, resulted in significantly increased levels of reliability, consolidated cost savings and flexible scalability.

As the market-leading virtual tape solution for mainframe environments, Sun's StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) system was the natural support technology for the SL8500. VSM improves operating efficiencies and lowers total cost of ownership by minimising the use of mainframe production resources.

DEWR upgraded its existing VSM as well as purchasing an additional system. This strategy results in equivalent VSM infrastructure at each of DEWR's computing facilities. This, in turn, provides DEWR with a robust data copying/mirroring facility between each site that complements the Department's overall Disaster Recovery solution in the event that one of the sites becomes inoperable.

The new system is populated by 33 high-performance Sun StorageTek tape drives, including the T9840B, T9840C and T9940B models, all of which are custom-designed for high-volume archiving, backup and disaster recovery applications.

"The entire project from concept and planning to installation, testing and final rollout took just a few months," said Tyler. "The old StorageTek silos had served us well but with the new SL8500s we were able to take advantage of all the technological improvements that have taken place over the years.

"This gave us a much more rationalised and consolidated tape environment than we had previously. On the technical side, we benefit from increased improvements in both capacity and performance. Additionally, because of the more compact design of the SL8500s we have a significantly smaller footprint on the ground - about 33 per cent less."

Sun StorageTek SL8500 system increases performance and lowers costs

With 60 terabytes of storage capacity within the new Sun StorageTek system, Tyler believes that any departmental demands for increased backup storage will be comfortably met now and in the foreseeable future. Faster data backups mean a significantly greater load of data can be handled in the same allotted eight-hour period.

"The successful upgrade of our data backup technology gives us the confidence to say that we will continue to backup our data using advanced tape technologies provided by Sun Microsystems, well into the future," said Tyler.