The leading UK supermarket moves from tape to disk for greener data storage and backup
The leading UK supermarket moves from tape to disk for greener data storage and backup
Shoden Data Systems UK, a server and data storage solutions provider, recently revealed how that it helped retail giant Sainsbury’s plan and implement a new resilient, high-performance backup strategy for mainframe and open storage.
As a result the retailer has lowered the cost, footprint and energy consumption of the 250 terabytes (TB) of backup data hosted within its IT infrastructure, while making backups run on time and with increased accuracy.
Sainsbury’s relies on its IT systems to offer the best possible customer service especially in terms of choice and availability of products in the stores and online, where shoppers can place orders 24 hours a day; for these reasons Neale’s team needed a very high-performance and resilient storage infrastructure and disaster recovery (DR) system that would not let them down. So after evaluating a number of options, the team selected Shoden’s QuickRecover for its stability, early return on investment (ROI), ease of use and post-sales service and support.
Ensuring a lasting legacy
Tim Neale, Sainsbury's mainframe services lead, said: “We chose Shoden's QuickRecover to address an immediate and growing set of problems: our ATL [automated tape library] maintenance costs were rising rapidly; we had an aging infrastructure approaching its end of life and we were suffering increasingly unreliable tape media. One of our data centres was also running out of floor space. Other vendors offered new or different tape-based solutions, but we were attracted to Shoden's bold approach to move us to disk-based backups using best-of-breed technologies such as Data Domain and Luminex alongside its own management software.”
“We were shown how powerful and flexible QuickRecover is, and were able to see for ourselves that mainframe data can gain significantly from de-duplication,” explained Neale. However, the key benefits for Sainsbury’s are the ability always to be able to restore without worrying about the integrity of the tape media, much faster write performance and, most importantly for us, we now have a backup environment within which we can actually test our DR properly.
“Shoden's approach of using just one configuration in a 19-inch rack to manage our entire mainframe environment and our expanding open systems platforms was also very attractive. I was relieved that no changes had to be made to our z/OS, JCL, applications or backup methods as everything continued to work transparently. We have now completely moved our mainframe backup environment onto a disk-based platform, and met our needs of recovering floor space and reducing costs.”
