Case Study: PML – Delivering High Speed Back Up and Disaster Recovery

The Project Drivers

As a leading marine research charity, Plymouth Marine Laboratory – PML – has a requirement to backup colossal amounts of data, safely and promptly. Their scientific research also necessitates them to cross-reference data from other agencies – including NASA – so they need quick access to both archived and recent research information. However, their backup and archive infrastructure was out-of-date and the reliance on backup to tapes was placing pressure on the teams to prioritise what should be archived.

Gary Holder, Head of Information Technology Group at PML, explains: “We had a 15-year-old server doing direct to tape backups. The amount of data being processed meant it was highly time inefficient to manage with hours of work and masses of tapes that needed swapping. It was a key priority to replace it.”

The Solution: A Modern Approach to Backup

Trustmarque, in partnership with Dell EMC, provided a comprehensive Backup and Disaster Recovery infrastructure, utilising Dell EMC Networker and 500TB Dell EMC Gen3 Elastic Cloud Storage, one of the first to be deployed in the UK. This included a refresh to the NW Servers to support OS versions and the deployment of Network Cloud Boost Appliance. While backup is now performed direct to disc and to virtual servers, it is physically cloned to tape for archive purposes using a Spectra logic Tape Library with LTO-8 Tape Drives and Media to ensure the greatest levels of performance and capacity.

Although still in the commissioning or roll-out phase, PML has already started to replace some outdated systems and has seen a number of early benefits. In particular, the efficiency of the new systems has freed up their staff to be more proactive. And they are confident it will help them to better manage costs and system upgrades in the future.

As part of the project, PML also needed to update their data to server load balancer from an existing model which was not powerful or scalable enough, creating a bottleneck in distribution.

“Trustmarque was able to work with PML to come up with an alternative option that offered a long-term solution. From a technical perspective, the originally proposed load balancer had limitations we wanted to remove. With the new solution from loadbalancer.org we have unlimited capacity that can expand and contract and has flexible licensing options to reflect that model,” comments Gary.

Why Trustmarque was selected as a partner

A large amount of time was taken to evaluate the options, but according to PML it was clear that Trustmarque and Dell EMC had a “strong partnership” that resulted in them working together to “develop the right solution”. PML was also impressed with the way Trustmarque used a consultative approach that utilised existing knowledge in the PML business.

Trustmarque and Dell EMC were flexible and responsive to the changing demands of the project, which included bringing in new technologies mid-way through as a result of new funding.

While Gary joined PML shortly after the tender – and so was not involved in the initial selection – he supported PML’s decision and commended both Trustmarque and Dell EMC for being “patient and accommodating” to his needs.

“As someone new to the business who is unfamiliar with the current systems – but making decisions on a project that the business is spending a significant sum of money on – it was reassuring to get such a high level of service. Their supportiveness reinforced my decision that it was right choice.”