Corrections Corporation of America

Sun Fire T2000 and Solaris 10 Cut Backup Window by 41 Percent, Accommodate Rapid Growth of Data

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is the nation’s largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities and one of the largest prison operators in the United States, behind only the federal government and three states. CCA currently operates 65 facilities, with a total design capacity of approximately 72,500 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

Customer Challenges

Decrease backup windows to avoid impacting system availability
Accommodate rapid growth in backup data
Minimize disruption to operations when changing backup servers

Solution

To host its Veritas NetBackup software, CCA replaced its Sun Fire 280R server running Solaris 9, with a Sun Fire T2000 server running Solaris 10.

Business Results

41% decrease in backup window for network-based backups (from 22 to 13 hours)
39% decrease in time to duplicate tapes for remote archiving (from 18 to 11 hours)
77% growth in backup data increased backup window by 8% (1 hour)
Increased availability of tape drives by 56 hours per day (8 drives for 7 hours)
Migration from Sun Fire 280R to Sun Fire T2000 in 1 hour, minimizing disruption to operations

Products and Services

Story Details

When daily backups can take as long as 22 hours to complete, there’s little time for system maintenance and other tasks, and no way to accommodate growth. In addition, long backup windows can impact system availability. That’s the situation in which Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) found itself in early 2006. The company’s Sun Fire 280R server running the Solaris 9 Operating System had been a workhorse for three years, but CCA’s IT staff realized that it was time to consider an upgrade. They conferred with Sun partner Strategic Technologies, who recommended the Sun Fire T2000 server running the Solaris 10 Operating System as the solution for a new backup server.

" All I can say is that the T2000 can just flat out move data. Thank you, Sun, for a great backup server! "

— Dan Bacus, Enterprise Engineer, Corrections Corporation of America

The migration went smoothly, thanks to careful planning and staging, as well as the inherent binary compatibility of the two Sun platforms within the SPARC architecture, and across different versions of Solaris. In fact, the migration for the entire backup system was completed in less than one hour. CCA’s IT team fired off backup jobs on the new platform, expecting to see performance improvements in the range of 10 to 15 percent.

The actual improvement was much greater. The day before the migration, the old platform had taken 22 hours to back up 3.5 terabytes of data. With the T2000, the same backup operation took just 13 hours, a 41 percent reduction. In fact, the running time was so short that the CCA IT team suspected that the backup jobs had not completed successfully, so they examined the NetBackup log files to be sure.

CCA saw a similar improvement for another task: writing duplicate tapes for offsite archival. With the old platform, this daily task took about 18 hours, and occupied 8 of the 14 available tape drives in the Sun StorageTek StreamLine SL500 modular library system. The T2000 performed the same task in just 11 hours, a 39 percent improvement. The faster tape duplication freed up 8 tape drives for 7 hours a night, increasing the availability of the tape library.

Even with those improvements, the T2000 was nowhere near full utilization. Since deploying the new platform, CCA’s backup data has grown to 6.2 terabytes—a 77 percent increase—yet the backup window has only increased from 13 to 14 hours, just 8 percent. The CCA IT team is confident that its T2000-powered platform has plenty of capacity to accommodate growth for years to come.

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