Customer Stories

posted on 23 April 2008 04:14

If you thought 'Thinking SAFE' was just another one of those deplorably dull government health and safety-style publicity campaigns you would be wrong. It is actually the moniker of a UK data protection company that has re-examined what's needed to backup and archive data and devised a way to do it without being hobbled by the increasingly unwanted constraints of tape backup software and tape automation devices.

In a world awash with networking capacity, data de-duplication, replication and affordable disk arrays, basing data protection processes on tape is possibly like basing data input processes on punched cards.

Thinking SAFE founders CEO Ed Jones (pictured) and CTO Julian Dean thought that what was being protected in backup sessions were sets of files, many of which were documents of one sort or another. So they started from a document management viewpoint. Their view was that only disk storage could provide fast restores and fast backup. Only disk could be the basis for a content-addressable store (CAS) which could de-duplicate protected files, thus saving space, and also provide a self-healing capability.

Everything that gets moved onto the backup drive array gets examined at the sub file-level and only unique content is stored; the rest is replaced by a pointer structure.

They thought it was wrong to use legacy tape backup software to move documents to be backed up from client systems to a disk storage system and wrote their own backup agent sofware for capturing data and moving it.

Since their backed-up data is a shrunken and compressed version of the original data, replication could be used to send it across network links to a separate disaster recovery site, thus avoiding man-in-a-van offsite tape transfer.  

Thinking SAFE believes its products are of great use to mid-tier customers with several offices. They will have the data protection complexity characteristic of larger enterprises without such business' large IT departments.

Customers in the UK such as Tenon, GB Airways and Amtico are in this area and use Thinking SAFE's software to protect their data. 

GB Airways is a BA franchise partner and its 15 aircraft fly 65 times a day to 32 destinations, and carry more than 2.6 million passengers a year. The company has 35 offices and 1,250 staff.

Its computer systems house applications for aircraft scheduling, crew rostering,engineering maintenance amongst others. There are Windows 2000/2003 servers and Windows 2000 and XP desktops, running Exchange e-mail and SQL Server, Paradox and Oracle databases. The 15 servers hold 400GB of data which must be available every hour of every day and protected against accidental deletion, disk failure, server crashes and office site disasters.

Thinking SAFE provides its software under a managed services arrangement to do this. Backup agents in each ofice move data to be protected automatically to a local office backup server, a CAS system. There it is hashed, using an MD5 scheme, and encrypted.

Only changed information is backed up. Then it is replicated to a central remote backup appliance in a Thinking SAFE datacentre. Again, only new information is replicated.

Users, or a Help Desk, can restore needed files quickly and easily. Data in the backup servers is automatically checked and if a file is found to be lost or corrupt, when compared to the local hash catalogue, it is restored from the central backup server.

The use of high capacity SATA drives, de-duplication and compression, combined with the saving of tape handling and tape transfer costs make this disk-to-disk-to-disk (D2D2D) scheme better value than tape. It is also faster than tape in operation meaning that a customer can have more stringent recovery point and recovery time objectives.

The head of IT at GB Airways is Lance Edwards. He said: "We have reduced the cost and complexity of running the backup and recovery process and have enabled significant imrovements to be made in our disaster recovery plans. We can now fully automate the backup process in all our offices and improve the quality of service IT provides to our internal and external customers ... We've got the solution I need to support my internal customers."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}