North Lincolnshire Council builds a resilient IT platform

Headquartered in Scunthorpe, England, North Lincolnshire Council employs 7,200 people. The council is responsible for many local services, including adoption and fostering, libraries, recycling, and education.

Disaster recovery challenge
Like many local authorities in England, North Lincolnshire Council manages an increasing proportion of its services electronically. Moving from paper to electronic processes gives members of the public faster access to information and services – but supporting a larger IT platform presented the council with a backup challenge.

As Mark Atton, IT Facilities Manager at North Lincolnshire Council, explains: “In the past, we used an IBM tape library with Tivoli Storage Manager to back up our data, which we archived off site. As we started to move away from paper processes, our estate grew from 20 servers to over 90 – with a total of 40 TB of data.”

With its volumes of data increasing, the council needed to ensure that its mission-critical application, file and database servers were fully protected.

“As our data was growing, backing up to tape alone presented a business risk,” continues Mark Atton. “We were overloading the backup server and the tape drives, which meant we had to do a lot of manual scheduling to fit all the backups into the available overnight window. The fact that all the data was stored on tape also made restores a relatively slow process.”

“We knew the existing backup infrastructure wouldn’t remain viable in the long-term. To ensure that we could keep providing an excellent level of service to our customers, we wanted a scalable backup solution that would provide high availability and resiliency for our growing amounts of data.”

Choosing a solution
North Lincolnshire Council engaged IBM Premier Business Partner Tectrade to evaluate its current landscape and investigate potential solutions.

“Tectrade reviewed our environment and informed us that the new features and functionalities of the latest version of Tivoli Storage Manager could offer us the speed and flexibility we needed to accelerate our backups and scale to meet future needs,” says Mark Atton. “To take maximum advantage of the new features of the software, we decided to carry out a hardware refresh in conjunction with the software installation.”

The council commissioned Tectrade to implement a high-performance IBM System x3650 class server connected to an IBM System Storage DCS3700 disk system. A Tectrade team with internal IT resource then installed the latest version of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and configured the software to back up the council’s 90 production servers to the IBM System Storage DCS3700.

“Tectrade proved to be an excellent partner,” says Mark Atton. “The Tectrade team kept us fully informed at every stage of the process, and their expertise really showed. They knew exactly what would work in a live environment, and used that experience to ensure that the implementation was completed on time and within budget.”

Better integration with VMware
Around 70 of the council’s servers are virtual machines running on VMware, and the council is using the Tivoli Data Protection for VMware API to enable highly granular backups and restores for these systems.

“With our previous solution, we only had the option of restoring VMware servers at the system level,” says Mark Atton. “Now we can easily perform file-level restores, so it’s much more convenient if a user just accidentally deletes the wrong file. The other advantage is that the proxy server that allows VMware to interface with the Tivoli Storage Manager server no longer needs its own storage pool, so we save on disk space.”

Saving disk space with deduplication
The data deduplication feature of the latest version of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager ensures that identical blocks of data within backup files are only stored once on the IBM System Storage DCS3700 – saving considerable disk space. This deduplicated data is ‘rehydrated’ when the disk pool is written daily to an on-site IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library, with no interruption to production services.

“Since the main backup takes place onto the disk system, the speed of the tape library is no longer a bottleneck for the process,” says Mark Atton. “This meant we were able to keep our existing tape library instead of upgrading to a faster model, which reduced the cost of the project.”

High resiliency
Since installing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, North Lincolnshire Council has achieved its aim of building a highly resilient and scalable platform – ensuring data protection and service continuity for its current system landscape, and providing headroom for the future.

Accelerating backups by 66 percent
Because North Lincolnshire Council now backs up its production systems to a disk storage system, backup runs can be completed significantly faster.

“One of our backups used to take about an hour and a half to complete,” says Mark Atton. “With our new solution, we can complete the same backup in 30 minutes – a 66 percent improvement. What’s more, using the deduplication feature, we’ve been able to compress our file storage data volumes by 50 percent – saving 8 TB of disk space.”

The latest version of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is based on IBM DB2^® database architecture, which provides a much more robust and manageable platform. For example, it allows system health checks to be carried out in real time, with no interruption of production systems. Previously, such health checks used to take a whole weekend to run.

“Thanks to Tivoli Storage Manager, we’ve gained a backup solution that meets our needs today, and for the foreseeable future,” concludes Mark Atton. “We can ensure that all our critical files and databases are fully protected, and minimise disruption when data needs to be restored.”