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Safeguarding vital scientific work
Y
A leading scientific research organisation required a reliable backup and data
protection solution which would scale to 400+ servers and keep pace with
rapidly expanding quantity of data. By Atempo.
CASE STUD
The Biotechnology and percent to around 250 occasional server failure. The
CKUP
Biological Sciences Research terabytes (TB). BBSRC fully BBSRC needed to ensure that
BA
Council (BBSRC) is the UK’s expects this growth rate to in any such event data would
leading funding agency for continue, or even increase firstly be backed up and
academic research and further, in the foreseeable secondly that data could be
training in the non-clinical life future. recovered quickly.
sciences. With an annual
budget of £450M, the BBSRC This doesn’t take into account It wasn’t just the size of the
supports some 1600 scientists the total volume of data data which presented a
and 2000 research students in handled by the BBSRC which challenge but also how it was
universities and institutes in includes less critical ‘tier-two’ used. As a scientific
the UK. Probably the most data. This is also increasing at organisation, the BBSRC had
widely-known area of research a similar rate. very different patterns of data
supported by BBSRC is the use to that found in a
technology that led to the One example of a major area corporate environment. As
first mammal clone, Dolly the of data growth is being well as backing up common
Sheep, at the Roslin Institute. driven by Genetic and file formats such as Microsoft
Genomic research Word and Excel, the BBSRC
The Challenge programmes where advances also has a myriad of scientific
The BBSRC, like many science in technology have meant that file formats, some of which
organisations, generates an processes which used to take can contain up to 300,000
exceptionally large amount of many years can now be files in the directory structure.
data which is crucial to the accomplished in days or This adds significantly to the
successful outcome of its weeks. Some Institutes are complexity of storage and
research activities. All of this now equipping themselves retrieval.
data needs to be safely with new technologies
stored, reliably backed up and capable of generating TBs of Furthermore, scientists by the
quickly and easily recoverable data on each run. collaborative nature of their
in the event of an IT failure or work tend to use their
disaster. Such volumes of data would Exchange mailboxes as
be a challenge for any information stores and often
However, the BBSRC was organisation. For the BBSRC it include large file attachments.
finding that the amount of was particularly important Although this is a practice
data being generated each that all of this data could be which can be actively
year was increasing backed up in a manner which discouraged by IT
exponentially and becoming would be secure, easy to use departments in a corporate
problematic to manage. and cost effective. The BBSRC environment, the situation in
Storage provision for ‘tier-one’ Institutes collectively run a a research environment can
data – the highest level of 400 server environment which be very different. Email can be
importance – had increased in like any organisation of an essential workflow tool for
just three years by 500 similar size is susceptible to researchers and scientists. As
SEPT 09 WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK
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