Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon Relies on NetWorker for Protecting Rapidly-Expanding Client/Server Network

Industry: Healthcare
Computing Environment: Mixed client/server network with 4 AIX servers and 20 Solaris servers with an IBM 3090 mainframe, and 83 networked clients.
Business Challenge: Automatically back up multiple servers, provide end-user recover capabilities, and effectively archive data.
Legato Products: NetWorker (Network Edition); NetWorker Archive, Autochanger Sofware Module, Client Connections.

Overview

When all data is stored on a mainframe, meeting operational and regulatory data backup requirements is a fairly straightforward task. But when host-based information networks are re-engineered to meet today's more cost-effective client/server paradigm, careful planning is required to ensure that daily storage management tasks do not become an expensive, labor-intensive, maintenance-prone nightmare requiring numerous separate backup systems and storage devices.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon (Portland) is one company that successfully met this challenge. As a health care provider offering a range of health insurance plans, including health care maintenance organizations (HMOs), preferred provider organizations (PPOs), and traditional fee-for-service plans, data backup is particularly critical to this organization. In addition to the requirements to be responsive to patients and providers, they must also meet the stringent requirements set forth by both the federal government and the Blue Cross Association.

Adding to the storage management challenge for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon was the complexity of their expanding client/server network -- a network that currently includes a legacy IBM 3090 mainframe, four IBM RS/6000s, and 20 Sun SPARC servers.

"Meeting the need for reliable, nightly backups was not difficult when all data was stored on our mainframe," explains Dean Russell, Lead Systems Engineer, at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon. "But when we began implementing a client/server network two years ago, we searched for a system that could efficiently and cost-effectively handle growing volumes of data as more and more applications were off-loaded to Sun workstations and other UNIX platforms. While a mainframe-based utility could potentially have met the backup requirement, it would have required that we coordinate mainframe and distributed backups, thereby adding to the overhead burden. In addition, the connection between the mainframe the the rest of the network was comparatively slow. Instead, he continues, we decided to implement NetWorker. It was the only solution we identified that met our requirements in so far as support for both autochangers and additional servers was concerned. And with this solution, we have automated not only our backup processes, but archive as well."

Key NetWorker Benefits

Easy Restores Maximize Productivity

Equally important, NetWorker has empowered end-users at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon to restore their own files without management intervention, so management overhead has been cut while end users get the file restoration turn-around they need.

To retrieve lost files, Mr. Russell explains, end users simply navigate through a graphical user interface to have the files restored from daily incremental tapes stored locally on two Exabyte EXB120 auoloaders, each with a capacity of 115, 5-gigabyte tapes. These devices are fully supported by NetWorker -- as are all other leading autoloaders. A schedule of retention times for the various workstations and servers in the network dictates how long each file is maintained on media in this device.

Archiving Optimizes Storage Management

On a periodic basis, daily incremental tapes are consolidated and archived using the NetWorker Archive option. All files archived this way appear as directory entries in the end-user applications and are easily accessed for restoration purposes. As a result, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon frees more expensive hard disk space for more immediate processing needs and optimizes utilization of tape slots in the autoloader for daily incrementals.

Using the automatic cloning feature of NetWorker, these archive tapes can be automatically duplicated for offsite storage. Monthly full backups are also removed for storage in an offsite facility.

Archiving tapes off-site is particularly important for the contracts and booklets Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon creates on their electronic publishing servers and which they are required to store for seven years. "With NetWorker Archive, explains Mr. Russell, we can easily establish two separate policies for these servers to facilitate development of both daily archive tapes as well as daily incremental backups."

Robust Media Features Simplify Storage Management

To facilitate storage management in complex networks, like that at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon, NetWorker allows media pools to be created that allow system administrators to specify different backup parameters for groups of files. "With media pools, files created on electronic publishing system servers, for example, are easily segmented for extended online storage -- as compared to those created by electronic publishing system workstations. The result: we are able to optimize jukebox storage space based on the criticality of data, while still ensuring that the files end-users may require to restore are available for reasonable periods of time."

The media pool feature has also enabled Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon to group their 20 separate servers into four separate entities, thereby streamlining overall network management, and reducing overhead costs.

Parallelism and Concurrent Device Operation Deliver High Performance

In addition to NetWorker's functionality, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon selected the storage management solution for its performance abilities.

"This highly efficient network data management solution is able to achieve backup speeds averaging 500 kilobytes per second because of its ability to concurrently back up all of our servers to two tape drives simultaneously, says Mr. Russell. File restoration times are equally impressive because of this concurrent tape streaming capability. In fact, with our duplicate tape drives, one drive may be used for backing up data while the other is being used to restore lost files. Alternatively, in the event of a significant data loss, both tape drives can concurrently restore files.

Summary

Thanks to NetWorker, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon has achieved their objectives of automating both backup and archive processes, as well as improving file restoration productivity. "NetWorker has enabled us to meet backup, archive, and restore requirements, minimize the hardware and software costs associated with storage management, optimize performance, and keep maintenance overhead to an absolute minimum, says Mr. Russell. In short, the system has met our expectations for both functionality and performance."