Case study: ATPCO raises data protection to new heights with IBM Tivoli software - Special feature: IBM 10th anniversary

Computer Technology Review, July, 2003

Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO) is the world s leader in the collection and distribution of airline fare and fare-related data. The company collects fare-related data from more than 500 airlines and distributes it to global distribution systems, such as Amadeus/System One, Galileo International, Sabre, Worldspan and computer reservation systems. With more than 40 years experience, ATPCO continually delivers solutions to the airline industry at lower costs, with greater efficiency and better accuracy.

Challenge: Cost Containment

Dale Tucker, assistant manager of Enterprise Servers for the distributed system environment at ATPCO0 sums up his IT organization this way: "We are very budget focused. Our goal is to provide the best solutions for the travel industry at the lowest possible cost. We operate on the idea that every dollar we save, saves our customers money."

This persistent focus on cost containment led ATPCO last year to review its approach to data protection for its distributed environment and evaluate whether there was a more cost-effective and resilient process to help improve data integrity and support near continuous operations.

The company's distributed environment, which today includes more than 20 IBM eServer xSeries systems running Microsoft Windows 2000, supports core infrastructure activities: software development, marketing and customer relationship management, business operations and IT services. If data is unavailable, employee productivity can be negatively affected and the cost of doing business can increase.

Any new solution for ATPCO would need to cost-effectively support backup and recovery of a growing pool of data. Only a year ago, ATPCO had less than half the amount of data in its distributed environment than it does today. "We're expecting an explosion in growth over the next five years" predicts Tucker. "We need to scale up into the terabytes of distributed storage without having to increase staff."

The autonomic computing, self-managing capabilities built into IBM solutions were developed to help organizations "do more with less." IBM solutions, such as Tivoli Storage Management software, that incorporate these capabilities can dynamically adapt to their environment and automatically configure, heal, optimize and protect themselves. This helps companies minimize vulnerabilities, improve data integrity and realize last time-to-value, all with less staff involvement.

Marc Schulwolf, senior account manager for Mainline Information Systems, an IBM Business Partner, explains: "The amount of information companies must store today is growing exponentially. Companies need tools, like those from IBM, to reduce the time and cost of protecting that data and to accomplish more with fewer resources."

Solution: Autonomic, Self-Managing Data Protection

ATPCO turned to Mainline for planning and optimization services as it implemented IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. Mainline is a provider of storage availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery solutions and services. It offers the full range of IBM storage hardware and Tivoli Storage Management software along with flexible customized services delivered by Mainline storage experts.

"We didn't want to reinvent the wheel. We wanted to learn best practices from an industry expert that had implemented Tivoli Storage Manager in other environments," says Tucker. "With Mainline, we were able to deploy Tivoli Storage Manager and optimize it for our environment in less than four weeks."

He adds, "I'm very satisfied. The solution became operational very quickly and any issues were addressed either by Mainline or IBM promptly." Tucker highlights that Tivoli Storage Manager is trouble-free and the Web-based interface is easy to use.

First, the self-managing features of Tivoli Storage Manager help keep storage management costs in check. Self-optimizing capabilities automatically optimize network bandwidth, tape usage and management overhead. Self-protecting features automate backup and archival of enterprise data, reducing the amount of administrator involvement required.

"The incorporation of autonomic self-managing capabilities was a critical factor in our selection of Tivoli Storage Manager," explains Tucker. "With these capabilities, I can spend less time worrying and need fewer administrators to manage the system."

Second, using Tivoli Storage Manager administrators can backup data to disk on the Tivoli Storage Manager server then migrate that data to an IBM TotalStorage LTO Ultrium Tape Library 3583. The result: multiple clients can be backed up simultaneously, saving administrators time and reducing the number of tape drives needed.

Third, the policy-based administration provided by Tivoli Storage Manager helps ATPCO efficiently archive data and manage data retention against corporate policy. Some data must be archived for seven years, some for only several months. Using Tivoli Storage Manager, IT administrators assign company data into one of three data retention categories. The software does the rest.