CaseStudy: Bank's Virtual Tape Library A Good Investment

The East Providence, R.I.-based Sovereign Bank purchased a DLT 8000-based tape library in October of 2002 to back up its growing data. Since then, the bank has expanded from 250 backup clients to 350, requiring it to back up 10 Tbytes of data weekly, in 12-hour windows for daily incremental backups as well as 60-hour windows for full backups on the weekend, said Joe Ambrosino, network operation manager. "That's a lot of tape."

Late last year, Ambrosino started looking at various tape and tape-replacement technologies, including hard disk-based virtual tape libraries, to replace the bank's tape library. At a user conference organized by Unicom, a Woonsocket, R.I.-based solution provider that had worked with the bank since mid-2000, one of the presentations caught Ambrosino's eye. Paul Noe, senior solutions architect at Unicom, was introducing a virtual tape library system from Southborough, Mass.-based Sepaton, whose name spells "No tape" backwards.

"Noe knew we were consolidating different platforms," Ambrosino said. "He had been in consultation with Sun [Microsystems] and Veritas [Software] on our consolidation. Since he was involved in that and in testing Sepaton, he put the two together for us."

As a result of the demo, the bank decided to test a hard disk-based Sepaton S2100-ES virtual tape library system, which emulates multiple tape formats and scales up to 200 Tbytes in a single unit. Unicom arranged for Sepaton to send a unit to the bank's Boston data center in late December for a 30-day evaluation.

For Ambrosino, having an evaluation unit was important. "Like any new technology, if someone can bring in a unit for us to kick the tires, it is a big help," he said.

With the help of Sepaton personnel, the installation went smoothly, Ambrosino said. The unit arrived at 10:30 in the morning and was working by 3 p.m. "I'm used to technology, especially in a bank, that takes a long time to implement," he said. "This one knocked my socks off."

A key attraction of the virtual tape concept was the fact that the unit did not require any change in the bank's IT infrastructure, Ambrosino said. Backups are staged to disk, with final backups for archival purposes still made to the bank's original DLT 8000 libraries.

Daily backups are now made to hard disk at 200 Gbytes per hour and then duplicated to tape, providing two copies of the data in well under half the time it took in the past. Weekly backups can now be sent to the tape library in safe, single 50-hour streams instead of several disjointed streams. Duplicating tapes takes only 14 hours, compared with 58 hours in the past.

Another advantage of virtual tape is the ability to keep two weeks worth of data online. "We don't have to shuffle so many tapes to get any data [that] customers need," Ambrosino said.

The move even has benefits for personnel, as bank employees are no longer required to staff the data centers on Saturdays and Sundays, Ambrosino said.

Several months later, the bank purchased the evaluation unit. Ambrosino said the bank is now evaluating two more units for its data centers, and a fourth unit is likely to be added in a new data center the bank is building. Multiple units will allow data to be replicated between locations and eliminate the need to keep five weeks worth of tape on-site.

Noe and Ambrosino both praised the ease of working with Sepaton.

"They are very customer-focused and partner-focused. Larger vendors may not be as friendly to the channel," Noe said.