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Storage and Server System Integrator Brings Deduplication Benefits to Mainframe Environment
January 2011 by Marc Jacob
Shoden Data Systems UK, an innovative provider of server and data storage solutions, today announced that it has helped RZV (Rechenzentrum Volmarstein) GmbH, one of Germany’s leading IT providers to the healthcare industry, significantly lower the cost, footprint and energy consumption of its mainframe backup infrastructure. To achieve this, Shoden consolidated the customer’s open and mainframe storage backups onto a single platform where it also replaced tapes with disks. As a result, RZV is now also able to run time-critical backups on time and with greater certainty.
Over the years, RZV has built an enviable reputation based on the quality and resilience of the services that it provides. To continue to uphold this status it needed a very high-performance and resilient storage infrastructure that would give its team 24/7 access to critical medical data, and after evaluating a number of options, RZV selected Shoden’s QuickRecover mainframe VTL appliance for its ease of use, ability to reduce costs while improving resilience, and unique capability to merge the mainframe and open systems backup infrastructures. Shoden installed this in combination with two Luminex Gateways to complement the existing Data Domain configuration used to backup and de-duplicate open systems data.
Working with its German partner, Comparex PC-Ware, Shoden carried out the installation, also enabling RZV to significantly enhance its Disaster Recovery (DR) processes thanks to the move from tape to disk, while curbing rising costs and floor space requirements.
“RZV has been a valued customer for us for many years. While working closely with its team to help develop the company’s IT infrastructure, we realised that we could improve the backup and DR capabilities by combining the existing approach to open systems based around Data Domain with Shoden’s QuickRecover,” said Ken Mullan, Strategic Consultant at Comparex. “RZV chose Shoden’s QuickRecover to address several problems including the reduction of its tape maintenance costs and the increasing number of tape-related issues. Other vendors offered new or different tape-based approaches, but we were keen to consolidate RZV’s backup environment and chose Shoden.”
RZV’s primary aim is the provision of reliable services; Shoden’s QuickRecover offers the ability to always restore data without worrying about the integrity of the tape media, and all within a single 19" rack that manages RZV’s entire mainframe environment and its expanding open systems platforms. Upon installation of the Luminex Gateways and the QuickRecover appliance no changes had to be made to RZV’s z/OS, JCL, applications or backup methods and everything continued to work transparently. As a result RZV witnessed the significant advantages that mainframe data can gain from de-duplication.
Within RZV’s mainframes, UNIX, and Wintel platforms environment, QuickRecover supports all the mainframe applications and generates daily, weekly and monthly reports on performance, de-duplication rates and the quantity of data it controls, the latter key to ensure that the Data Domain appliance does not run out of capacity.
“RZV needed to strengthen its mainframe backup and DR strategies and make them more cost-effective while building on the successful Data Domain-based infrastructure that was already in place for open systems’” said Phil Jones, CTO of Shoden Data System UK. “Working closely with Comparex, we were able to build a solution that went as far as exceeding RZV’s needs. It was a challenging project but one that we were delighted to participate in, and to bring to a successful conclusion.”
Following the significant improvements brought about by Shoden and Comparex, RZV is already planning to expand the use of QuickRecover to its archiving infrastructure.
