EDGE2012 - How IBM ProtecTIER Makes the Difference in Enterprise Environment

This EDGE2012 presentation given by George DeBiasi and Kosta Mushkin provides excellent insight into the use of the IBM ProtecTIER product at an unnamed large Canadian-based retailer. The retailer has two data centers with approximately 2PB of storage which is growing rapidly at a 40% plus rate of growth. The company uses an aggressive 14 day retention with 50TB plus of data being backed-up daily (over 400TB per week). The data growth is stressing the existing environment and tape management.

The retailer has chosen ProtecTIER to solve their current and future needs caused by rapid data growth. The primary reasons for selection presented by IBM is as follows:

- Scalability (supports up to 1PB of storage in 1 cluster)
- Performance (backup performance is over 2800MB/second with restore at over 3000MB/second
- High availability (both Control Path Failover and Data Path Failover with the VTL in an AIX environment)
- Data integrity (constant data verification during backup and replication)
- Global Data de-dupe (in-line de-dupe and de-dupe of replicationed data)
- Backend disk flexibility (fiber channel, RAID5, enclosure failure protection

We have many readers who are using AIX and other UNIX environments with their large enterprise computing environments. So, this solution may have some interest to those installations or satellite environments with a similar environment.

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