GOVERNMENT

Silicon Graphics has been selected by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGE&Y) UK plc in a project to roll out a Storage Area Backup and Recovery Engine (SABRE), to optimize the back-up and recovery of data within CGE&Y's outsourcing delivery infrastructure. Partners working on the SABRE project include SGI, Atempo and StorageTek who will provide the underpinning technology, including an SGI Origin 350 server and SGI InfiniteStorage TP9500 RAID storage array designed to significantly reduce back-up times. Three centers are already live in the UK with the new Storage Area Backup and Recovery Engine, which allows CGE&Y to centrally manage its assets and leverage the economies of scale through a common management platform. CGE&Y also wanted to ensure that customers' increasing data volumes were not affected by the quality of data backup and data access times. The new system, booked in October, will automate the entire data backup process, which can be managed centrally and integrated with a system scheduler and central management-reporting tool. SABRE will also reduce costs with the potential for less lost time. Working with SGI and the other partners, the company has implemented a sub-minute initiation of recoveries, as opposed to a three to four hour time scale for manual processes, which recall from the manual vaulting system. Atempo's Time Navigator software provides the backup and recovery of customer files. The SGI Origin 350 provides server backup supported by the TP9500 storage array providing the virtual tape, improving the performance of the data backup windows, with the data then moving on to a StorageTek(R) robot. This means that CGE&Y are able to back up more data within a fixed time period and provide quicker recovery times. SGI InfiniteStorage is the world record holder in backup and restore and specializes in high-performance, scalable storage solutions for consolidation, data access and sharing, data lifecycle management and data protection. Based on SGI's scalable NUMAflex(TM) shared-memory architecture, the SGI Origin 350 server can be expanded modularly from a stand-alone, two-processor technical server to a larger high-performance computing system with up to 32 processors, 64GB of memory and 62 PCI-X slots. TP9500 combines 2Gb Fibre Channel technology with 10,000 and 15,000 RPM disk drives, parallel high-performance controllers, and advanced cache management to deliver the throughput needed for demanding, large-scale, data-intensive applications. Integrating the patented multi-pathing architecture of the 5884 storage controller from LSI Logic Storage Systems, Inc. enables the TP9500 system's performance levels. Tim Butchart, UK General Manager at SGI comments, "Cap Gemini is not alone as organizations in the UK see substantial increases in the growth of company, and in this case, customer data. We are working with these companies to find smarter and more cost effective ways of managing their storage needs as data volumes escalate, whilst their own customer expectations increase. Working with Atempo and StorageTek, we have developed a solution that is efficient and also highly scalable to allow for shifting data storage requirements."