Case study
The Institute of Oceanology conducts research in the Baltic Sea and in the seas of the European Arctic.
Support for Xen and XCP-NG, as well as continued tape library support (via IBM Spectrum Protect) – make the software a unique solution for private cloud backup.
Region: Europe
Who
The Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IO PAN) was founded in 1983 in place of the Marine Station in Sopot, which had existed since 1953. The mission of the Institute is to conduct fundamental research on the ocean environment, and to enhance our understanding of the phenomena and processes that take place in our seas. The Institute of Oceanology conducts research in the Baltic Sea and in the seas of the European Arctic.
Before
Thanks to the technology used in modern science, huge amounts of data can be efficiently processed, which results in significant savings in terms of the resources required. When ecology is part of your daily life, identifying ways to reduce ‘emissions’ comes naturally. In this context, we also see virtualisation as a green solution to IT systems as it can help to reduce infrastructure installation and maintenance costs. It is not only about minimising system downtime and increasing flexibility, but is also about efficient use of equipment, reducing the overall complexity of the system and – which at first glance may be surprising – reducing the emission of carbon dioxide.
One feature of our infrastructure is that it is highly dispersed. We have the Oceanology Institute as well as research units equipped with laboratories and technical facilities. The basis of our environment is a private cloud that uses VMware and Xen, and is made up of many physical servers of differing ages and versions.
We do not have a centralised system dedicated to conducting backup of our resources. Our backup policies are also very diverse, are based on scripts, and are initiated manually. These factors mean that there is no control over the correctness (consistency) of the backups made.
As of 2020, our infrastructure consisted of 20 hosts, 200 virtual machines and 400 TB of disc space.
Our input
The Storware vProtect solution fulfilled all our needs with regard to having a universal solution for backup and data recovery. It provides support for many different hypervisors, in particular those we currently have in use: XenServer and XCP-NG.
In addition, vProtect enables centralised management of backup policies as well as providing control over and accountability of tasks. An undoubted benefit given the amount of archived data we produce is the support for our data storage bank in tape libraries.
The above functionality – support for Xen and XCP-NG, as well as continued tape library support (via IBM Spectrum Protect) – make the software a unique solution for private cloud backup.
One particular feature that makes Storware stand out is that they listen to their clients’ needs. In our case, this resulted in discussions on adding support for open source backup systems such as Bacula/Bareos. Consequently, the software would be practically the only one that supported such a range of hypervisors for tape libraries using opensource software. In our opinion, this would open up new areas for vProtect: large academic and scientific networks with many thousands of hosts, many types of hypervisor, and backed up in libraries storing thousands of tapes.
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