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

Computer Technology Review, July, 2003

"It's very difficult to manage several different levels of retention policies," Tucker points out. "The policy-based administration within Tivoli Storage Manager handles all that very effectively."

A disaster recovery solution is also essential. Two disaster recovery tests each year help confirm that, if needed, ATPCO IT staff can restore business operations from a remote location. Based on company guidelines, IT staff must recover critical applications within 24 hours and other data within 48 hours. The Disaster Recovery module of Tivoli Storage Manager helps ATPCO meet these guidelines and recover its distributed systems, regardless of the offsite hardware. In fact, in a recent disaster recovery test, Tivoli Storage Manager allowed staff to restore critical business data in less than six hours.

Finally, the multi-platform support and scalability of Tivoli Storage Manager offers ATPCO protection for its investment as its infrastructure grows. Linux, IBM-AIX, Sun, Solaris and HP-UX are all possible platforms that the company may need to support one day. Likewise, integrating Web services and Java into its applications is a huge focus, as ATPCO evaluates deploying new Web-based revenue applications in its distributed environment.

Results: Cost-Effective Business Continuity

With cost containment the top priority, ATPCO has looked to Tivoli Storage Manager to help improve data availability and reduce the time and money required to backup and recover data. Already, the company is seeing positive results.

IT staff now manage backup and recovery procedures in less than one hour each day. The software handles basic storage management tasks, such as tape reclamation, data archiving and expiration, and point-in-time restores so efficiently that operation staff no longer need to manage tapes or even know where the data is. The process is self-managing.

"We can set up policies and then walk away and let the software do the work for us," says Tucker. "Our data can grow several terabytes without our having to add staff."

Mainline helped ATPCO develop customized scripts so that Tivoli Storage Manager would automatically e-mail LAN administrators status reports each morning that review the previous day's administrative tasks and backup operations.

Says Don Nash, systems engineer for ATPCO, "What used to take us an hour, now takes us five minutes, thanks to the automated reports that we receive from Tivoli Storage Manager."

The speed of data restores also plays an important role in the organization's costs. "The longer data is unavailable, the more it will cost the company and the lower our service- level indicators will be," explains Tucker. "Tivoli Storage Manager is a very cost effective solution to efficiently handle offsite storage and disaster recovery and quickly restore data."

Future: Around-the-Clock Data Protection

ATPCO has also purchased IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Databases as part of its data protection solution. In conjunction with Tivoli Storage Manager, this module allows database servers to continue running their primary applications while they back up and restore data to and from offline storage. Now, ATPCO no longer has to take its Microsoft SQL Server offline to perform backups, thanks to the 24x7 access to data that Tivoli Storage Manager for Databases provides.