Career Education Corporation

On-line University Turns to Sun for VTL-Based Data Protection Solution

Career Education Corporation is the world’s largest provider of for-profit post-secondary education. The school has more than 80 campuses and three on-line universities offering doctoral, master’s, bachelor’s and associate degrees as well as certificate programs.

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Customer Challenges

Protect information used in post-secondary education activities
Ensure fast recovery of lost or corrupted information
Keep IT staffing costs and media expenses low

Solution

Revamped storage platform consisting of a Sun virtual tape library (VTL) and Sun modular library system improves backup/restore times and decreases media costs while meeting compliance requirements.

Business Results

$200,000 saved annually in reduced media costs
90% reduction in restore time with VTL (20 minutes versus 3.5 hours)
Ability to accommodate 30% growth in data

Products and Services

Story Details

Online university Career Education Corporation (CEC) is never closed: Students and faculty use the company’s Virtual Campus application to access educational resources every day, around the clock. That fact poses problems for the school’s data protection administrators, who must make sure that backups don’t impact availability of resources. At the same time, to ensure high levels of productivity they must be able to restore lost or corrupted information quickly.

CEC is a long-time user of Sun storage. A Sun StorageTek Flexline FLX380 storage system has provided reliable storage for the school for several years. However, as data volumes—and backup run times—continued to grow, it became apparent that CEC would need to upgrade its existing data protection platform.

" The Sun Virtual Tape Library has decreased our restore times by 90 percent and saved us approximately $200,000 annually in media costs. "

— Paul Skowronski, Data Protection Administrator, Career Education Corporation

The school had a number of goals. It wanted shorter backup times, but more importantly, faster restores. Centralizing and standardizing backup administration was also important, to save IT staff time and keep headcount low.

CEC realized early on that virtual tape library (VTL) technology was a promising way to meet all of its goals. Since this was a new technology for CEC, the school’s IT staff identified two key selection criteria: ease of implementation and top-notch support. In addition, CEC decided to invest in additional tape libraries, while keeping the existing FLX380 system in use.

In a series of tests conducted by CEC to evaluate VTL performance and usability, Sun beat out the competitors. For its main data center as well as its remote disaster recovery site, CEC chose the Sun StorageTek VTL 3380 and the Sun StorageTek SL500 Modular Library System with LT03 tape drives and data cartridges.

Sun Professional Services assisted CEC with the installation and implementation of the Sun VTL and SL500 libraries. Sun consultants prepared the site, assessed power requirements and installed the systems in a single day. CEC staff were impressed with the responsiveness of the Sun team: Whenever they had a question, Sun consultants would respond immediately. A SunSpectrum support agreement is in place to help ensure high availability of the storage solution.

The CEC backup environment is controlled by Veritas NetBackup 6.0 software. The FLX380 storage acts as the system controller for the Sun VTL. Backup data is written first to the Sun VTL, about 8 terabytes per night. Then, under the control of NetBackup, the data on the Sun VTL is written to the SL500 tape libraries which are archived offsite for disaster recovery and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

This process shortens backup times dramatically, which increases the availability of production applications and databases. Backups used to run all night long, a full 12 hours. Now they take just a fraction of the time.

Using VTL as the primary backup target has reduced CEC’s data cartridge usage by 10 per day, since the local copy of data is no longer stored on tape. At about $80 per cartridge, the savings amount to over $200,000 annually.

Restores are much faster from the Sun VTL compared to tape. Even if the data cartridge is physically resident in the tape library, restoring a typical 300 gigabyte file can take up to 3.5 hours. The same operation takes only 20 minutes with the Sun VTL, a 90 percent reduction.

CEC appreciates the reliability and scalability of its Sun storage platform. There have been virtually no problems with the Sun VTL or the SL500 libraries, saving travel time for datacenter staff. The combination of the Sun VTL and the SL500 libraries can expand to keep up with CEC’s 30 percent annual growth in data, with little disruption to production operations.