布里斯托尔大学的DXI ACES考试

Protecting the University of Bristol’s data means backing up hundreds of physical and virtual servers, and meeting stringent service level agreements (SLAs) for restore. For years, the team has relied on disk backup for “critical” data—with a short restore SLA—keeping it for 30 days on Data Domain deduplication appliances.

Existing System Can’t Support Growth

However, when they needed to increase capacity—from around 10TB to more than 100TB—they hit a wall. The backup and restore performance was not fast enough — and to cover their new needs they would have to make an initial purchase big enough to cover years of growth because the system had limited scalability.

“Being forced to buy lots of disk capacity now to accommodate future growth is something that doesn’t work for us because we are always trying to operate within somewhat unpredictable yearly budgets,” explains Graeme Cappi, Head of Systems and Operations at the University of Bristol. “So being forced to buy a big unit at the start—and later having to do a forklift upgrade—was a nonstarter.”

该团队研究了其他替代方案，吸引了经销商Q Compariates以帮助。

Testing Finds the Clear Winner

To make sure they found the right technology, they set up proof-of-concept tests for two alternatives:Quantum’s DXi appliances, which scale by adding controllers and disk arrays separately; and products from a relatively new competitor that scales to large capacities by linking multiple appliances together.

Using NAS, both were faster than the Data Domain’s 120 to 150MB/sec performance, but the team needed more. “After tweaking the systems, the DXi gave us about 265MB/sec in NAS mode—the ExaGrid unit topped out at about 180MB/sec,” Cappi reports. “Then the Quantum team suggested that we write some of the larger jobs to the device using a virtual tape library interface. The speeds were dramatically faster—we quickly got to 300MB/sec—and NetWorker worked perfectly with the devices both in the VTL and NAS presentations.”

So the decision was made. “The DXi appliances offered us good initial pricing, the highest backup and restore performance we saw, and a great system of scalability. It allows us to add both performance and capacity in increments by purchasing additional controllers and disk trays when we need them. We also have complete confidence in Quantum and Q Associates to provide enterprise-level support.”

DXi系统满足SLA需求,提供高伦雅芙e Service

The new system protects nearly 150TB of critical primary data each week using two pairs of replicating DXi appliances: one for the University’s institutional data, the second for data from individual departments. Backups are first written to the primary DXi using a VTL, NFS, or CIFS interface, and then replicated to a second site.

“备份都在我们的窗口中完成，我们每天都复制备份，”Cappi说。“滞后距离备份末尾只有大约30分钟，在第二个站点上具有完整的副本，因此我们在几分钟内始终始终在磁盘上有两个副本。从DXI恢复非常快。它们几乎立即发生，我们在所有关键数据中都会满足我们的同日恢复SLA的麻烦。“

服务一直是示例性的。“几周前，我们报告了复制的问题，并在周五下午提出了一张票，”Cappi说。“当IT管理员周一早上出现时，预计在与服务团队一起度过手机上时，他了解到Quantum已经解决了周末复制的问题并正常工作。”