UPDATED 11:00 EDT / APRIL 24 2014

Brown University’s data protection journey: from one-size-fits-all to DR-as-a-service | #CUBEConversations

brown university 1The disaster recovery landscape has changed considerably over the last few years as disk-based backup appliances slowly but surely displaced legacy tape in enterprise environments, a transition that Brown University’s Nancy Magers says has enabled her team to reduce hardware costs and greatly improve data protection at the organizational level. She shared her journey with Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante on the latest episode of SiliconANGLE’s CUBEConversations series.

Located in Providence, Rhode Island, Brown University is the seventh oldest college in the United States and a member of the prestigious Ivy League. As the associate director of data recovery and storage, Magers is responsible for keeping the technology infrastructure that supports the school’s approximately 20,000 students, faculty and staff running smoothly – and cleaning up the mess in the event of a failure. That difficult task took on new proportions in 2009, when Brown embarked on a sweeping IT modernization initiative that would transform its backup and recovery operations.

Rebuilding the data center

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The challenge stemmed from the fact that the university’s the data center was already well over 20 years old at the time, but setting up a new facility would have been too costly. As a result, management decided that the best course of action was rebuilding, which had to be done without taking down any of the mission-critical processes end-users depended on for work. “That’s a pretty scary thought to somebody whose job it is to protect the data, knowing that I’m going to have all of my power and cooling and raised floors and walls around my systems replaced live,” Magers tells Vellante.

Until that point, Brown used tape for backup, writing data to a magnetic drive overnight and shipping off a copy to a third party storage provider. Besides being slow and expensive, the procedure was unreliable as well, since the university had never run a disaster recovery test to check that information kept off-premises could be retrieved fully and in a timely manner.

“Every now and then we would have to recover some data and we could get one or two pieces back, but we never looked at recovering an entire service and large amounts of data that we’re putting out onto tape,” Magers details. This arrangement simply didn’t cut it for the project, so the university allocated funds to implementing a comprehensive business continuity plan that would guarantee a quick recovery should an outage occur during construction.

Magers and her team started from ground zero, explaining the risks to decision-makers and walking them through the challenges. “We let them know that we’re going to be doing construction and there was a real potential for us to take down their services, cutting water mains and things like that. So they really understood there was a real potential for us to create a disruption in their services,” she says.

The next stage was quantifying the impact of failure on everyday operations and end-user productivity. A total of 33 mission-critical applications were identified and graded based on how fast they need to be brought back online after an outage and the amount of data that the university can afford to lose, Magers recalls. Once that was done, IT began sorting out the details.

Before & after

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Today, Brown uses EMC’s Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) replication software to protect its databases and mainframe and utilizes the firm’s RecoverPoint continuous data protection tool to safeguard its VMware environment. Additionally, instead of shipping tape drives to a third party, the university now performs network backups internally with an in-house DataDomain deduplication appliance. Data is replicated to a secondary site in New York to ensure reliable recovery in the event of a large-scale natural disaster such as a hurricane.

As far as testing goes, all 33 services deemed critical by the university are assessed over a 48 hour period every year. “We stand up all of our services as if it were a disaster, we do it in an isolated network, and we have our users actually come into that isolated network and validate that the services are running within that network to their satisfaction. So we now know that our services are recoverable, we’re meeting our windows, and our users have validated that that’s the case,” Magers says.

The new set-up has helped Brown reduce operational risks and save money on backup media, benefits that Magers and her team are currently working to extend across the school’s petabyte-plus repository of unstructured data, which she explains is simply too big to back up using traditional solutions. That’s why they opted to move to an Isilon scale-out NAS system that can asynchronously replicate information directly to the New York facility leveraging the built-in SyncIQ software.

photo credit: Mr. Ducke via photopin cc

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