Denmark-based Gyldendal Optimizes Business Resilience with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Achieving business resilience means anticipating risks and preparing for them in advance. And in the category of risk mitigation, one key class of IT solutions is certainly data backup and restoration. If IT is now the central nervous system of many enterprise-class businesses, data is its lifeblood. Maintaining high levels of integrity and availability for that data throughout its lifecycle-even at late stages such as archiving-is absolutely mission-critical in almost any modern business context.

For Gyldendal, a major Denmark-based publishing house, this had become truer than ever before. Like many companies, Gyldendal had developed its IT division as a series of responses to immediate needs over a period of decades, rather than in accordance with the terms of an overarching plan designed to match the technology to business requirements over time. The result? Disparate systems were in place throughout the infrastructure, each implemented as a standalone element rather than as part of an integrated whole. And for many of those systems, a similarly isolated solution had been deployed in parallel to attend to core data backup/restoration needs. Furthermore, the inefficiency of the technology translated into an inefficiency of the associated business processes. Manual attention was required to manage these processes in many cases, requiring IT personnel to oversee an operation which would more ideally have been automated whenever possible.

When company executives audited the IT infrastructure and realized this piecemeal architecture was responsible for backing up and restoring a sum total of business data estimated in multiple terabytes, they knew the time had come for a significant revision.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Delivers Best-in-Class Features, Management and Performance
Their choice? IBM. In IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, Gyldendal found a best-in-class, federated solution capable of addressing the full range of backup, restoration, and archiving requirements in place throughout the company.

Among today's enterprise-class data management products, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is a premier product for many reasons, not the least of which is its centralized, policy-based management and flexibility. Within the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager framework, data is associated with devices that fall into two classes of pools: sequential (which typically means optical drives and tape) and random (disk). These pools can be arranged hierarchically in backup processes so that less significant data can be migrated to slower pools and more critical data to faster pools. In both cases, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager enables extensive automation through scripting via an integrated command-line environment.

This translates into a tremendous business win in the form of optimized flow of data as it crosses the network; it is possible, for instance, to minimize overall network impact not just by scheduling backup processes to occur at times of low system demand, but also by using network branches with lower traffic. And IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is also fully compatible with any type of host computer, spanning the full continuum from simple laptops at the client end to IBM System z mainframes at the server end.

For Gyldendal, that feature set was obviously an excellent fit to meet their needs. With this one IBM solution, they could replace every one of the disparate backup products currently in place, dramatically simplifying their data management architecture. Furthermore, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager's scripting and policy-driven design meant that many backup processes which had previously required direct attention from IT staff could now be completely automated, not just freeing staff time for more critical IT tasks, but also eliminating inadvertent errors that might crop up. The overall result was an improvement as measured by every data backup metric: higher speed, accuracy, manageability, scalability, and over time, lower costs.

Deploying the solution was a relatively straightforward process. Gyldendal turned to an IBM business partner, IT WIT, which focuses on IBM Tivoli-driven data backup implementations. Following initial consultation and assessment, IT WIT's specialists suggested that Gyldendal prioritize on a case by case basis, determining the business priority associated with different forms of data and business processes and creating formal backup policies designed to map to those priorities.

Making the New IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Strategy a Practical Reality at Gyldendal
How did this translate into practice? Already in place at Gyldendal was a storage area network (SAN) containing a broad spectrum of different forms of data; this data is now being backed up automatically in different ways depending on its business significance. High-performance forms of backup storage, such as disk arrays, are used to handle the data with highest significance, while data that has been determined less crucial, and which therefore has lower availability requirements, can be stored on slower devices, such as tape libraries and optical drives. This type of priority-driven implementation is a considerable improvement over the company's prior arrangement, in which data was sometimes mapped to storage devices with inappropriate features.

In the area of performance, Gyldendal has also received a substantial boost. The company had originally backed up all files and databases every night, but as the total volume of data grew, that goal became less and less achievable. This meant that nightly backups could no longer address the full range of data changes that had taken place each day, creating a significant business risk of lost data in the event of a technical outage for any one of multiple possible causes, such as database corruption or hard drive failure. And because the various backup systems in place were unable to assess the data intelligently, redundant data and files exacerbated this issue by needlessly consuming time and resources in the backup process.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager facilitated a dramatic optimization in this area through its intelligent data evaluation. Once a given file has been initially backed up, the solution doesn't back it up again unless changes have been made to it. The result is higher performance for any given nightly backup, resource reduction through lower network bandwidth consumption and storage as files move to target locations, and improved business resilience, since the company can now achieve a complete backup of all new data each night, despite the vast size of its archives.

Management, too, will be significantly enhanced once the transition to IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is complete. At that point, the product will deliver a central point of control for all management functions, yet that point of control, due to the solution's browser-compatible implementation, will be accessible from multiple physical locations throughout the IT infrastructure.

Finally, through the solution's comprehensive logging and reporting features, Gyldendal will also achieve substantial gains in service visibility-tracking the success of the overall backup strategy, as well as every point within it, in complete detail.