Cybernetics Review

DIRECTV

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V Series helps DIRECTV shrink its backup down to size.

Based in El Segundo, California, DIRECTV delivers satellite-based television services to more than 16.8 million homes and businesses throughout the US and Mexico. The company prides itself on providing outstanding content, technology, service and value in support of the seamless viewing experience that customers demand.

R.L. Beasley, IT Manager for the company, says, "To administer and control movie schedules, our facility requires an enormous quantity of computers and applications to support 24X7 operations." In fact, Beasley's team supports a growing number of mission critical servers running Exchange, SQL and Oracle databases in addition to over 200 single application Windows, Unix and Linux servers ranging in capacity from 50 GB to 1.5 TB. That's an enormous backup job, and Beasley chose the 9 TB miSAN^® V Series to shrink it down to size.

Beasley had been using 4mm tape drives before switching to a disk-based backup strategy that copied data from file system to file system. The problem was that overhead made disk-to-disk backup operations slow - only 300 MB per minute - and there was no method to transfer to removable tape for disaster recovery. After comparing products from HP and Cybernetics, Beasley chose the Cybernetics miSAN^® V Series and is seeing an over 4X increase in performance over the old disk-based backup method. Now, he can write any virtual tape to removable tape on schedule, or on demand, with absolutely no impact on the servers.

First introduced in 2004, the miSAN^® V Series is a D2D2T solution that combines the incredible speed of disk-to-disk virtual tape backup with the security of removable tape archives. Using familiar Ethernet components, this virtual tape library provides scalable, enterprise-wide access for centralized backup and restore, at speeds of up to 300 MB/s. Quick and easy to install, V Series allows IT Managers to automate backup for days, weeks, and months without operation intervention and to run multiple backup jobs concurrently to independent logical libraries within the VTL.

Because V Series emulates a tape drive, Beasley was able to utilize his existing Arcserve backup software package to backup multiple servers simultaneously and export to tape weekly for disaster recovery. Beasley's archive tape solution is Cybernetics' 24-slot LTO-3 library, which provides 400 GB to 800 GB on each removable cartridge. Because the virtual tape is streamed block by block directly from the miSAN^® RAID, tapes can be created at speeds up to 432 GB/hour. For the ultimate in data protection, the miSAN^® V Series is also available with optional Data Encryption. Both virtual tapes on disk and removable tapes bound for an off-site facility can be encrypted and kept safe from unauthorized access - a tremendous benefit for the growing number of organizations who are legally bound to ensure the confidentially of employee, customers, client and patient data.

In business for over 30 years, Cybernetics builds data storage solutions noted for their exceptional performance and reliability. They are at the forefront of iSCSI storage networking technology with disk, tape, and virtual tape solutions that meet the challenges of the most demanding computing environments - with certifiable ROI.

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