"We had trouble gaining access to, and using all the data in, the statewide information network, which in a great part was captured in our remote offices."

Net Gain (cont.)

With the shot clock ticking, Indiana's Office of Technology puts a full-court press on revamping backup

Clearing a lane for data traffic

One of IOT's main challenges was determining how to protect and use all the data captured at the remote offices in a cost-efficient manner.

The other traditional IT approach to remote office backup-apart from swapping out local tape drives-has been to transmit backups online every night to a main data center. The requisite (and costly) network bandwidth and time, however, made this approach prohibitively expensive for the state. During the consolidation planning, Moongate alerted IOT that Symantec was about to release a solution called NetBackup PureDisk that offered an answer to the remote office data problem.

PureDisk is a disk-only backup product for remote offices that uses a data-reduction technique called "single instance storage" or "de-duplication."

PureDisk saves storage capacity by examining all the data at the remote site and eliminating redundancies. The data is then sent to content routers, which store only the segments of data that have changed. This approach slashes the amount of data that needs to travel over a network by 10 to 50 times.

"I had been doing some research on my own, and most of the other players in this space were small shops," says Jim Rose, systems administration manager for IOT. "Symantec and Veritas are two organizations we've trusted for many, many years, so it was a no-brainer for us to go with PureDisk."

Additionally, Moongate assisted in developing the implementation roadmap for PureDisk at IOT. Julie Kennedy, president of Moongate, noted that the state would be able to reduce the capacity stored with PureDisk when that product was integrated with NetBackup, making this technology even more beneficial.

"Companies don't have time to stay fully in front of vendors' functionality and roadmaps for the future," Kennedy says. "Because of our ties to Symantec, we know their vision is to dovetail these products into a single enterprise backup solution."

Of the state's approximately 1,000 remote offices, the consolidation project targeted 300 that had servers and local data storage. Roughly 200 of those servers were running a single Microsoft Active Directory environment using Symantec Backup Exec software and backing up to a local tape drive.