Protecting 200 TB of unstructured research data

A major UK Research Institute shares their story of a successful collaboration with Atempo to backup and archive essential research data.

Atempo’s UK customer is a medical research institute with unstructured data sets currently in excess of 200 terabytes and showing phenomenal growth rates.

Each month, research projects generate millions of very small files and many voluminous high resolution images and videos which need backing up and archiving.

The challenge faced by the Institute’s Solution Architect was to ensure she had backup storage which could scale with primary storage requirements.

The Institute uses a wide variety of operating systems, data sources, file types and file access control lists. Data protection must run smoothly and maintain full integrity and the quality and performance of each backup is equally important.

The research institute chose to deploy two Atempo solutions to ensure the initial brief was respected:

• Atempo Time Navigator (Tina) using the backup protocol NDMP to ensure backup consistency and providing deduplication rates of almost 60%. Backed-up data is currently stored on LTO7 and LTO8 tapes fully supported by Tina.
• Atempo Miria is used to store specific data to tape indefinitely. Miria allows the Institute to perform secure data movement for completed projects using a simple drag and drop to a chosen storage target.

Miria and Tina are complementary. Both solutions ensure data is backed up and archived in a suitably secure environment. Data growth is manageable because full scalability is a core solution feature.

Looking ahead, the customer is looking at several possibilities to further engage with Atempo data protection solutions. Firstly, there is a requirement for a laptop protection solution initially for one hundred machines. This would bring into play Atempo Lina which enables endpoint protection for roaming machines with its powerful deduplication and CDP (continuous data protection) capacity plus its secure centralized admin platform.

And because Atempo is entering an exciting phase of convergence for its range of solutions, life will become even simpler for the storage and backup admins. Other yet unchartered territory could see Miria and Tina protecting some or all of the institute's virtual machine pool.