With storage demand growing 40% annually, the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) needed an affordable, scalable deduplication solution to support mission-critical applications. The institute integrated an IBM System Storage ProtecTIER Deduplication solution into an existing infrastructure that includes IBMTivoli Storage Manager, IBMPower and IBMSystem Storage TS3310 Tape Library with LTO 4 tape drives. The IBM solution reduces administrative tasks from 14 hours to four, enables a petabyte level of scalability, and increases the number of generations of backups being stored from seven to 30. For more information on Storage - Tape System T Series, visit http://ibm.co/ONeH7m. Visit http://on.fb.me/LT4gdu to 'Like' the official Facebook page of IBM India Smarter Computing.

1. IBM Systems and Technology Education
Case Study
BCIT changes the school
of thought on storage
with IBM ProtecTIER
Protect More. Store Less.®
Established in 1964, the British Columbia Institute of Technology is one
Overview of British Columbia’s largest post-secondary educational institutions with
more than 48,000 students enrolled. From accounting to technology
The need
management, BCIT offers a range of degrees, diplomas and certificates
With storage demand growing 40 percent in six schools of study at five main campuses and satellite locations across
annually, the British Columbia Institute of
Technology (BCIT) needed an affordable, a wide geographic swath of southwestern Canada, including the city
scalable deduplication solution to sup- of Vancouver.
port mission-critical applications.
The solution The school’s mission is to serve the success of learners and employers by
providing high-quality technical and professional education and training
BCIT integrated an IBM® System
Storage® ProtecTIER® Deduplication that supports graduates as practitioners, and by advancing the economic,
solution into an existing infrastructure social and environmental prosperity of British Columbia.
that includes IBM Tivoli® Storage
Manager, IBM Power® and IBM System
Storage TS3310 Tape Library with LTO® When storage needs outgrow the existing
4 tape drives. infrastructure
The benefit The storage infrastructure at BCIT supports a diverse computing envi-
The IBM solution reduces administrative
ronment that includes a variety of mission-critical applications, databases
tasks from 14 hours to four, enables a and testing environments running on a heterogeneous hardware infra-
petabyte level of scalability, and structure that includes IBM Power Systems™ and IBM BladeCenter®.
increases the number of generations of
To manage backup and recovery of unstructured data files and data
backups being stored from seven to 30.
from applications such as Oracle, IBM Lotus Notes® and Microsoft®
Exchange, the organization uses IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. An
IBM System Storage TS3310 Tape Library with four LTO-4 tape
drives is used to create offsite copies of all data.
Over time, BCIT’s legacy deduplication solution could no longer handle
the strains of a storage environment that was growing 40 percent annu-
ally, says Peter Hadikin, senior systems analyst at BCIT. This was causing
nightly administrative tasks to take between 12 and 14 hours.
“Our administrative tasks were taking longer and longer to complete,”
explains Hadikin. “What we needed was a solution that could decrease
our backup window and also help us backup additional servers that were
coming online.”

2. IBM Systems and Technology Education
Case Study
“ProtecTIER is a solution
that can stay now and
just grow as we need it
to. We’re quite happy
with where we are.”
—Peter Hadikin, senior systems analyst, British
Columbia Institute of Technology
A key shortcoming of the old deduplication device was that it could not
be expanded easily within a single footprint. “We found it quite frustrat-
ing that we were hitting capacity and had nowhere to go other than to
buy more appliances,” says Hadikin. “We had sized it for five years of use,
but in a little over two years’ time we had already filled it up. Since we
couldn’t expand our previous solution, our only option would be to add
additional appliances.”
IBM ProtecTIER solves the storage riddle
At that point, Hadikin and his fellow team members, Victor Arcega
and Richard Reinert began looking for a new deduplication solution
that could seamlessly integrate into BCIT’s existing infrastructure, deliver
better performance, and offer the scalability needed for a growing central
data repository. After analyzing these requirements among various
vendors, BCIT decided a single ProtecTIER unit was the best choice,
especially in terms of scalability.
“We got the total comfort of knowing that no matter what, we weren’t
going to exceed the size of ProtecTIER in five years,” says Hadikin.
“Looking forward 10 years or more, we’re still not going to reach the
petabyte level of disk that ProtecTIER supports.”
Early in the process, Hadikin and other BCIT team members partici-
pated in an IBM ProtecTIER Customer Council event, which gave the
team an opportunity to learn how other organizations had implemented
the solution. BCIT’s own implementation, which was scheduled to take
five days with IBM assistance, took only three. “The implementation
went very smoothly,” says Hadikin. “There was little to no disruption to
our backup and restore environments. And the migration of the data from
our old environment to the new environment was very easy to perform
and was carried out without impacting normal TSM backup and
archive activities.”
2

3. IBM Systems and Technology Education
Case Study
Configured to serve BCIT’s distributed multicampus layout, the 36TB
Solution components: ProtecTIER solution is located at the downtown campus, about nine
miles from the main campus. The ProtecTIER unit receives incoming
Hardware
data through two 4-Gb Fibre Channel network links. About 350 servers
● IBM® System Storage® ProtecTIER® use Tivoli Storage Manager to backup and store 200 terabytes’ worth of
Deduplication solution
● IBM System Storage TS3310 Tape data through ProtecTIER—about 300 million unstructured data files.
Library with LTO® 4 tape drives
IBM Power Systems™
●
Enabling a new storage paradigm
Software The benefits of ProtecTIER are numerous, according to Hadikin. The
● IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager nightly administrative tasks, which used to take 12 to 14 hours, are now
completed in 4 to 6 hours. “We’ve basically opened up eight hours of
additional time to schedule backups,” says Hadikin.
Many administrative tasks have been automated—or in some cases
eliminated—with ProtecTIER. “In the previous solution we had to
schedule administrative tasks on a weekly basis depending on how full the
device became,” explains Hadikin. “While these tasks were running, they
impacted the maximum performance of the appliance quite significantly.
Those tasks might run for a day or more, which required more juggling
of the schedule. Those activities are now handled automatically by
ProtecTIER.”
ProtecTIER’s flexibility made it simple to integrate with BCIT’s existing
storage infrastructure, and all backup functions can still be performed
from a single Tivoli Storage Manager server. ProtecTIER has allowed
a consistent 5.5:1 deduplication ratio, and the number of virtual
tape drives has grown from 16 in the previous solution to 128 with
ProtecTIER—with additional room to expand to 256. Says Hadikin,
“When we issue a restore we can have multiple streams of data
being run to a single server, and we now have the capacity to restore
many servers at one time, in a timely manner.”
Hadikin and his team have also used ProtecTIER to eliminate a step at
the end of their backup cycle, in which data had to be first staged locally
in TSM disk storage pools and then migrated to the remotely located
deduplication appliance. The elimination of this step has freed up four
terabytes of local storage, saved a great deal of TSM processing and also
provided immediate separation of our production data from our backup
data. The ProtecTIER solution also enables BCIT to store far more
generations of backup files—from seven generations with the previous
solution to 30 generations today.
Despite the numerous operational benefits ProtecTIER offers, Hadikin
says it’s the scalability that gives him the greatest peace of mind moving
forward. “ProtecTIER is a solution that can stay and just grow as we
need it to,” he says. “And with IBM, you’d be hard-pressed to find better
support. We’re quite happy with where we are.”
3

4. For more information
Contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner,
or visit us at: ibm.com/systems/storage
For more information about the British Columbia Institute of
Technology, visit: www.bcit.ca
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2011
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May 2011
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