Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets has deployed new storage technology at its London headquarters and a remote recovery site outside the City to protect data and ensure business continuity for a 200-position trading floor.
The corporate banking and financial markets division of Lloyds TSB installed supplier Data Domain’s restore and replicator software at the two sites, replacing a legacy tape backup system.
Lengthy restore processes and concerns over the risks associated with using contracted services to handle backup tape transportation to the remote site, provoked the move to the new technology.
Data for the division’s financial operations is now safeguarded and time and cost savings accrued. The Data Domain technology uses high speed in-line data de-duplication technology to reduce the firm’s backup data volume by 20 times and store it to disk, for faster and more reliable backups.
The replication software means that completed backups at the London site are copied to the contingency site within minutes, and operations are centrally controlled and fully automated via the firm’s backup software.
Colin Everett, head of IT strategy and architecture at Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets, says the division has eliminated 120 locally-attached tape drives and the associated management overhead.
‘Our ability to scale our backup capacity and test for compliance has been streamlined, and we can now retain 30 days of backup data onsite which we can restore reliably and quickly,’ he said.
The biggest assurance is ‘knowing that our data is replicated to our contingency site within minutes, minimising the risk of any disruption in IT functionality at our headquarters in London,’ he added
Hamish Macarthur, chief executive of analyst Macarthur Stroud International, says the de-duplication technology is a form of virtualisation which cuts unnecessary copying of data.
‘The key problem with computer systems is that nothing is backed up in a timely fashion. As the volume of data in organisation increases, it is essential to find faster ways of backing up,’ he said.
‘De-duplication technology focuses on block transfer rather than file transfer of data and is a quicker way of copying large volumes of heavy data.’
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