Arcserve Safeguards Data in New Open University Project

Arcserve LLC announced that its Unified Data Protection (UDP) software has been selected by Open University led project to support the economic growth of the city of Milton Keynes.

The MK:Smart project will tackle demands on transport, energy and water and relies on multiple terabytes of data gathered from around the city: UDP safeguards that data, which is spread across 12 virtual and six physical servers, by backing it up in less than 30 minutes. In addition the software can recover VMs in less than ten minutes.

Milton Keynes is one of the UK’s fastest-growing cities. The Open University is leading the three-year MK:Smart initiative to boost growth by minimising strain on the infrastructure as the city expands.

The newly built MK Data Hub is at the centre of the project: it holds data about energy and water consumption, transport, weather and pollution sourced from satellite technology, sensor networks, social and economic data sets, social media and specialised apps.

The MK:Smart initiative’s success depends on third party applications that use its data; and then Milton Keynes residents adopting those applications to make the most of the city’s resources. The data has to be constantly available and failure to back it up is not an option.

With data located in a multitude of stores and expected to reach multiple terabytes, the Open University needed a scalable and versatile backup and recovery solution.

UDP delivers assured recovery through backup, DR, replication and HA technology. It carries out a full backup of the MK Data Hub once a week in less than 30 minutes and it runs incremental backups on weekdays at four intervals throughout the day, these taking no more than ten minutes. Backups are replicated to a DR site elsewhere in Milton Keynes for additional data protection.

UDP’s unified architecture across virtual and physical environments offers ease-of-use via a web-based interface and combines backup, replication, HA and source-based data deduplication technologies in one solution. Capabilities enable users to establish, test and improve RPOs and RTOs on-premise, off-premise and in the cloud.

It was UDP’s backup and recovery capabilities – as well as its ability to recover data over a SAN – that convinced The Open University to select it over a number of available alternatives to protect its MK Data Hub. A proof of concept demonstrated compression rates of 40% and deduplication rates of 30% , which will increase further as the initiative takes on more data. The Open University then implemented the core UDP in less than three days then fine-tuned it to optimise backup and recovery capabilities across its diverse data stores.

Julian Gilbert, MK:Smart senior systems administrator, said: “We need to ensure the data is always available for any project using it in its own application and for the people relying on those applications. With Arcserve UDP MK:Smart data can run 24/7 and it has given us the freedom to be as productive as we need to be at any time. Its remarkable scalability and flexibility will ensure the software adapts in line with our requirements as our levels of data grow.“

Giovanni Goduti, Arcserve sales director Northern Europe, added: “MK:Smart is the first project of its kind – but as resources become increasingly precious there will be a demand for more like it. We’re setting the standard here and Arcserve technology is at the very heart of what the project is doing – helping to manage the infrastructure of an entire city to make sure everyone who lives in Milton Keynes gets the best possible services.“