North Wales Police Case Study

Case Study

Sector: Public services Esdebe iSCSI to fibre bridge

A little-known, far more cost-effective option to leverage iSCSI with NetBackup appliances

North Wales Police serve a population of 687,800 over 6300 km², and their 1450 officers, 250 community support officers and 800 other staff have helped make the region one of the UK’s safest places to live.

Business Benefits

• • • • • • •

Much lower cost than a replacement backup system Totally avoided operational disruption Rapid, implementation – plug ‘n’ play, fit-and-forget technology The iSCSI to fibre bridge solution has been 100% reliable since installation Increased general service speed and quality Increased backup speed No staff training required.

The Challenge Organisations often use iSCSI to expand their SAN. North Wales Police have a particularly large virtual infrastructure connected to their data storage over iSCSI, and although their backups were completing there was potential to improve performance.

Each day, data was drawn from storage over iSCSI, through the servers hosting the virtual infrastructure, over the network and into the NetBackup Appliance because, although it had a fibre channel, it could not operate directly over iSCSI. “This is an extremely common problem because most organisations think this setup is their only option unless they pay for a replacement backup system – which is expensive. It isn’t true; there is a far more cost-effective solution,” explained Andy Kosinski, Director at Esdebe.

Email: info@esdebe.com Tel: +44 (0) 845 686 9600 www.esdebe.com

The Solution Esdebe recommended and implemented a well-tested bridging solution to connect the NetBackup appliance directly to the storage facility. The technology is a cost-effective, high-performance protocol gateway for connecting fibre channel-based servers to iSCSI-enabled peripherals.

They also added and leveraged NetBackup Accelerator for VMware to dramatically increase backup speed by only reading the changed blocks on each virtual disk.

The Results Esdebe’s recommendations avoided disruption and cost by using robust and reliable, fit-and-forget technology which also provided much greater infrastructure transparency.

“Now errors are dealt with early in the backup time window. Previously they sometimes overhung into the following day. Because the backups are completed within a shorter time window we can action any errors earlier on in the day.

“The improvement in VMware integration has been a great help in upgrading performance,” explained Andy Cunnah, Innovation and Business Development Manager at ICT North Wales Police.

Bridging the system in this way meant that North Wales Police did not need to commit capital expenditure to a replacement backup solution. Instead they leveraged their existing investment in NetBackup by simply adding a hardware bridge, so there was no need to change any procedures and they didn’t need training to use the new software.

“The bridge has been 100% reliable since it was installed. Because data no longer needs to be pushed through the infrastructure’s front end, data throughput has increased, backup windows have reduced and the CPU load on the virtual machine cause by backups has been completely removed. We have also dramatically accelerated backups of VMWare through the use of NetBackup’s V-Ray technology,” added Andy Kosinski.

Email: info@esdebe.com Tel: +44 (0) 845 686 9600 www.esdebe.com