SEPATON speeds backup and recovery times for the American Institute of Physics (AIP).

AIP is a national organization that promotes the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics by providing scholarly professional societies with a diverse range of services, including; print and online publishing, ecommerce and membership data management services and numerous additional resources. When AIP’s IT staff recognized the need to improve their data protection technology, they chose a SEPATON® S2100® virtual tape library (VTL) to get the speed, flexibility, and high availability their organization requires.

The Environment
AIP depends on a sophisticated, centralized Oracle® database system to run its complex operations, including membership and circulation management, journal publication management, and a wide range of business operations.

“Our ability to access and manage data is central to our success as an organization,” said James T. Wonder, Director of Online Technology, AIP. “We have very high standards for our data protection.”

Before choosing SEPATON, AIP was using Qualstar® tape libraries and EMC Net-Worker soft ware to backup and restore their data. As AIP’s data volume continued to increase over time, their backup and restore times were growing longer, putting their stringent recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) at risk. A key issue for AIP was the amount of time required to restore data. Because they sent backup tapes off-site, they had to wait up to six hours for their off-site storage provider to locate and deliver the tapes needed for restores.

“As a rule, we take action well before an issue becomes a crisis,” said Wonder. “We anticipated a need for a faster, more flexible system that would not be disruptive to our existing infrastructure and we immediately began to investigate virtual tape library technology as a solution.”

AIP also wanted a solution that would support their long-term data protection plans. “Over the next four years we plan to move to a tapeless environment,” said Wonder. “Moving to disk will save us time, money and end-user aggravation.”

The Evaluation
The organization chose to evaluate a SEPATON S2100-ES2 VTL solution. Two important factors set SEPATON apart: performance and extensibility. “The SEPATON technology had the backup and restore performance we wanted and it has a long-term product roadmap that dovetails with our four-year plan,” said Wonder. “We felt that SEPATON’s forward-thinking roadmap would enable us to realize our vision of a tapeless environment and it would continue to be an industry-leading technology well into the future.”

AIP performed an extensive on-site evaluation of the SEPATON VTL in a full production environment. “We challenged it in it every way we knew how and it performed perfectly,” said Wonder.

The Solution
AIP installed a 7TB SEPATON S2100-ES2 and continued to use their NetWorker software without changing their policies or procedures. “I can’t believe how easy it was to put it into our environment,” said Wonder. “I plugged it in, turned it on and started using it. The GUI was so easy to use, I was delighted.”

The Results
The AIP organization saw immediate results from their SEPATON system. Backup times have been dramatically reduced and restoring their data has never been faster or easier. “We can find and restore whatever data we need in a few minutes,” said Wonder. “That means our end-users are getting better service and our organization is operating more efficiently.”

In the near term, AIP intends to take advantage of SEPATON’s uniquely scalable technology to grow their SEPATON system in terms of both speed and capacity. “Going forward, we also plan to replace our off -site tape vaulting with the SEPATON Site2 electronic vaulting soft ware and to implement SEPATON’s DeltaStor® software for data deduplication,” said Wonder. “We are very pleased with our investment in SEPATON technology.”


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