APTARE StorageConsole Delivers Peace of Mind for Large University

In charge of safeguarding the data of Canada's third largest university, Ramon Kagan was faced with both a challenge and an opportunity.

Mr. Kagan is the manager of Unix Services at York University. Spread over two campuses in the greater Toronto area, the university has 23 research centers and more than 57,000 students, faculty, and staff. The Computing and Networking Services organization is responsible for most of York's computing infrastructure, including the university's networks and data storage, centralized email, and telecommunications systems.

Mr. Kagan and his staff of eight administrators handle a broad portfolio of responsibilities in system design, deployment, and implementation. They are also in charge of data storage and capacity planning. They manage a daily backup of up to 14 terabytes of data across 500 clients. And even greater growth is on the horizon.

Time for a Change

"York's administration has mandated a massive expansion in the university's research capabilities," Mr. Kagan explains. "To hold up our end, we will have to expand to hundreds of terabytes of storage — maybe even into the petabyte range — within the next few years."

This added urgency to Mr. Kagan's search for a strategic backup reporting and management solution. His organization uses VERITAS NetBackup™ for daily backup and recovery operations. But the group was dependent on rather limited tools for reporting and management tasks.

"We found that we had to create our own reports for the information we wanted on our backup operations," Mr. Kagan says. "And since we're not programmers, we used scripting to generate the reports we wanted.

The reports, which had to be generated daily, provided no historical correlation of storage activities. Even worse, they were a maintenance headache. The report scripts had to be revised every time Mr. Kagan's staff installed a new software version or patch.

The group also found itself burdened with a very time consuming, mundane task. During restore operations, the NetBackup administration console identified only the first tape that would be needed, then the next, then the next — one at a time. A staff member had to run to the tape library repeatedly during each restore.

"We were wasting 10 to 15 man-hours a week running back and forth to the tape library," Mr. Kagan recalls.

Capacity planning was another area where the group used a very primitive tool: instinct. "We had no precise way of calculating how many tapes we might need for future backups," Mr. Kagan explains. "We were literally doing our capacity planning by gut feel."

An Intuitive Solution

When his group decided to purchase a backup reporting and management solution, they considered several vendors and ultimately evaluated products from APTARE¨ and one other vendor.

As Mr. Kagan and his staff evaluated the two solutions, they soon realized that they preferred the user interface of APTARE StorageConsole¨.

"We liked APTARE StorageConsole from the moment we started using it," says Mr. Kagan. "There were no complicated menus. For us, the browser-based dashboard interface made it useful right out of the box. We found it to be intuitive and something more: it actually reflected the way we think."

Mr. Kagan was sure that APTARE StorageConsole was the right solution before the three-week in-house evaluation was completed. When the evaluation ended he learned just how right it was.

"When I took the evaluation software offline, my people started complaining to me right away," he recalls. "They had learned how much easier their lives could be with APTARE StorageConsole, and they didn't like being without it."

A Clear Point of View

"The reporting capabilities are exceptional," says Mr. Kagan. "We can start with a system-wide view, and then drill down to the file level. We can view reports for specific clients within the university, and they're all simple, clear, and easy to read."

His staff enjoys access to detailed, real-time views of errors and backup success rates with no tedious scripting. They can instantly call up backup and restore error logs for a single storage device or several. They can easily identify systems that may need priority attention using a Consecutive Errors by Client report.

Their internal customers in the IT departments across the university are enjoying the same benefits of APTARE StorageConsole's reporting capabilities. "APTARE StorageConsole gives everyone a clean, clear point of view," says Mr. Kagan. "It gives our clients a more open, honest view of the backup system, so they know their data is safe."

As a service organization in a non-profit enterprise, Mr. Kagan's group doesn't charge his internal customers. Yet, he uses APTARE StorageConsole's Chargeback Report, and the Billing and Usage Reports to break down his costs and monitor his efficiency. He also uses the SLA reports to make sure he's not just meeting, but exceeding the industry-standard 85-percent backup success rates.

Peace of Mind

With APTARE StorageConsole, Mr. Kagan's storage administrators can easily isolate scheduling issues. Restores and capacity planning are both simple and precise.

"With APTARE StorageConsole's Media Forecasting dashboard, I always know how many tapes I have in the library and how many I'll need," he says. "I feel safe, knowing that my tape needs are covered, even over three-day weekends and holidays when our systems are running on their own."

Mr. Kagan estimates that APTARE StorageConsole has freed up at least 8 to 10 man-hours a week among his staff. But for him, the benefits of having a complete reporting and management solution go far beyond greater efficiency.

"With APTARE StorageConsole," he says, "we've gone from pain to simplicity across the board in our data protection activities. We know everything we need to about our backup operations and success rates," he adds. "And in data protection, knowledge equals peace of mind."