Harbor Backup Reduced Backup Time From Hours to Minutes

Company
VP is Denmark’s Central Securities Administration, an organization that monitors and registers all securities trades in Denmark, including international trade. VP registers security trades worth more than 100 billion DKK per day. Annually, this comes to approximately 30,000 billion DKK ($30 trillion US).

Environment
In 1998, VP executed 3.4 million transactions. To simplify administration of their busy system, the company decided to create an open-system environment from their two computing environments: a mainframe system and LAN servers running Windows NT. Instead of installing hard disks on each server, VP attached the servers to a Hitachi Freedom Storage™ 7700E disk system with a capacity of 918 GB. The result was one of the first Storage Area Networks (SANs) in Denmark. It provided unprecedented flexibility and ease of use. For the first time, the Windows NT environment offered the same high level of service that was previously limited to traditional mainframe environments.

Problem
The current backup system was too slow to meet the new server availability requirements.

Solution
Harbor Backup was installed, allowing the entire network, regardless of platform, to be backed up rapidly under central control.

Results
Harbor Backup, in conjunction with the Hitachi Freedom Storage 7700E system:

• Improved backup speed by a factor of 20. Backup speed went from 350 MB/hour to 7 GB/hour
• In test environments, VP achieved speeds of 26 GB/hour backing up and restoring files larger than 100 MB
• Backup time dropped from a few hours per day to as little as 10 minutes per day
• Administrative overhead was reduced; instead of using two full-time employees to maintain storage management in the LAN environment, VP now needs only the centralized storage management functions, which control all platforms. With these speeds, Harbor Backup not only reduces backup times, it also addresses VP’s crucial requirement of quick data recovery if problems arise.