Australian Government Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR)

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To cope with the rapid growth in data storage requirements as a result of government policy and new workplace reform initiatives, DEWR needed to increase the capacity of its existing backup infrastructure. The Australian Government’s Work Choices and Welfare to Work initiatives are expected to increase data volumes, so the Department had to create capacity in advance.

The Department has used tape backup storage technology from StorageTek within the IT Facilities Branch since the early 1990s. Its two Canberra-based centers handle the data processing and storage requirements for all of DEWR’s applications. This backup technology ensures that information is available to government and public users 24x7. After thoroughly considering and examining available alternatives, the Department opted to enhance its existing Sun StorageTek mainframe and server tape backup infrastructure with the newest-generation Sun technology — which delivers more storage space with greater performance and lower operating costs. “DEWR has a strong tradition of looking over the horizon and embracing technological change whenever it is appropriate for us to do so,” says Tony Tyler, Director of Data and Desktop Services at DEWR. “However, StorageTek’s tape backup technology has consistently proved its worth to us and after careful and full analysis, we couldn’t find a sustainable business case to move to another vendor.”

A powerful Sun StorageTek StreamLine SL8500 modular library system, which replaced an existing Powderhorn 9310 silo at each site, resulted in significantly increased levels of reliability, consolidated cost savings, and flexible scalability. In addition, a SunSpectrum Platinum service plan helps DEWR maintain high availability within its IT infrastructure.

As the market-leading virtual tape solution for mainframe environments, Sun’s StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) system is the natural support technology for the SL8500. VSM improves operating efficiencies and lowers total cost of ownership by minimising the use of mainframe production resources. DEWR upgraded its existing VSM as well as purchasing an additional system.

This strategy results in equivalent VSM infrastructure at each of DEWR’s computing facilities. This, in turn, provides DEWR with a robust data copying/mirroring facility between each site that complements the Department’s overall Disaster Recovery solution in the event that one of the sites becomes inoperable. The new system is populated by 33 high-performance Sun StorageTek tape drives, including the T9840B, T9840C and T9940B models, all of which are custom-designed for high-volume archiving, backup and disaster recovery applications. “This gave us a much more rationalized and consolidated tape environment than we had previously,” explains Tyler. “On the technical side, we benefit from increased improvements in both capacity and performance. Additionally, because of the more compact design of the SL8500s we have a significantly smaller footprint on the ground – about 33 percent less.”

The Sun StorageTek-based storage infrastructure increases storage capacity and improves performance within the mainframe and server tape backup systems in advance of the introduction of the Government’s new industrial relations and workplace reform initiatives. “It is using around 60% less electricity and generating around 75% less heat,” explains Tyler. “All of that has positive economic flow-back in a notional sense when you are looking at the overall costs of running a datacenter.” With 60 terabytes of storage capacity, Tyler believes that any departmental demands for increased backup storage will be comfortably met now and in the foreseeable future. “The successful upgrade of our data backup technology gives us the confidence to say that we will continue to backup our data using advanced tape technologies provided by Sun well into the future.”