University of Cambridge Institute cuts backup time by 99 percent

CISL works with future leaders: helping them develop the skills they need to tackle critical global challenges. Through education programmes, business platforms and strategic engagement initiatives, the institute deepens future leaders’ social, environmental and economic understanding. 

The Institute selected Arcserve UDP to accelerate backup times, increase availability and speed up its data recovery. Combining industry-proven backup, replication, high availability and true global de-duplication technologies within one unified console for virtual and physical systems, Arcserve UDP’s feature-rich solution also offers advanced recovery capabilities and unmatched ease-of-use.

CISL has used Arcserve’s backup solutions since before 2007, beginning with tape backup, then moving to disk-to-disk. But demands on the Institute’s storage system has increased: its IT system has virtualised and its volumes of data continue to grow. The Institute holds 2.5TB of data, a large amount of which is sensitive, and needs to be readily available at all times. It is therefore essential that its 23 virtual and physical servers are running smoothly and are well protected to ensure business continuity.

By modernising its backup and recovery strategy with Arcserve UDP, CISL has been able to:
Ensure the availability of information for staff and stakeholders
Prevent any disruptions due to slow backups
Safeguard its reputation with future leaders by improving its ability to recover server data

CISL’s newly-deployed Arcserve UDP allows offsite backups for an extra layer of protection. CISL is now able to recover data from remote sites where a tape autoloader is located. Monthly backups to this target offer further peace of mind.

The IT team at CISL, led by IT manager Ellis Karim, was keen to address the institute’s rapidly growing volumes of data, which were impacting business performance: overnight tape backups for example took more than 18 hours. Furthermore, the institute’s existing LTO 4 tapes could only hold up to two weeks’ worth of data – equalling around 1.5TB – meaning that older files had to be recovered from tape, which was disruptive and time-consuming.

With limited internal IT resources, the institute needed to find a single, comprehensive and easy-to-manage automated backup and recovery solution, a scalable product that would reduce the need for tape backups and offer the same, if not better, level of data protection.

Now Arcserve UDP protects data across one physical server and 22 virtual machines running on three Citrix XenServer hosts. A total of 2.5TB of data is backed up including SQL server databases, Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, Microsoft Office files and a CRM system.

Every night Arcserve UDP automatically carries out incremental backups across CISL’s virtual and physical servers, and during the day, file, email and database servers are backed up every four hours, with each backup taking just ten minutes, a task that previously took up to twenty-two hours.

Arcserve UDP has also reduced the need to backup to tape as it gives up to 90 days of incremental backups, meaning that Karim and his team rarely need to go back to tape.

“Arcserve UDP automates the whole data protection process. After completing the incremental backups, it creates virtual standby servers at a remote site and then replicates the data to the university’s main data centre. All we need to do is monitor the process,” said Ellis Karim.