Customer Stories

posted on 01 July 2008 10:27

The London red bus is famous the world over. One of the current operators is Arriva and it ended up with multiple different and incompatible tape backup systems. Seagate's EVault online backup service got it out of a jam involving twenty servers and six different backup tape formats. Now it has just one online service making the IT sysadm's life much, much easier.

Arriva London, part of Arriva Plc, provides more than 19 per cent of the capital’s bus services under contract to Transport for London (TfL). Contracts involve routes, vehicles and timetables specified by TfL. Arriva London operates from nine garages in north London, and from six in south London. Its busses travel more than 50 million miles each year, involving nearly 330 million passenger journeys.

Arriva London’s head office in Wood Green stores and manages all of the scheduling, rostering, HR and payroll for its London bus operations. As the company grew so did the demand for data. Its legacy backup system was built on tape technology. This created problems, the well-known ones - tape backup was slow, errors were frequent, and IT staff spent much time managing the backup and recovery process.

The situation was made worse by the fact that as new servers were installed the tapes they required changed, which meant that IT staff had to deal with a number of different tapes, of different sizes, stored in different locations.

Alan Ricot, Arriva London's IT manager, said: “The situation was getting to the point where it was becoming hard to manage, staff were frustrated by the lack of uniformity and we needed a change. We have some twenty servers and five or six different models of tape drives, each requiring a different tape format.”

Perceiving that replication software is often expensive and bandwidth-intensive, Alan looked elsewhere. Following a data storage seminar, hosted by EVault’s reseller BSG, Alan was impressed by EVault’s disk-based online service. He thought that it could be an ideal fit, as it eliminated the need for physical tape backup.

Alan commented: “I contacted EVault in January after initially being introduced to them through their reseller BSG. ... I decided to go ahead with the thirty-day free trial, using three of our servers as a test bed. We continued the trial until March and following a proposal to Alan Sewell (Arriva Finance Director), decided to migrate all of the remaining servers from tape-storage to online disk-based storage.”

“The implementation itself took just a couple of weeks, once I was shown how to install one it was pretty easy, so I had most of the servers up and running by April. EVault then returned to check the solution was running efficiently and trained the remainder of the team.”

Arriva London now has a single, centralised back up system that can be managed from just one terminal. It no longer has to worry about the management, retrieval and storage of physical tape, which has lead to efficiencies and space savings across the whole IT department. Online backup is much faster and Arriva London has been able to eliminate the time spent previously on tape management and minimise the administrative errors inherent in this process.

Alan commented: “As soon as the (EVault service) was implemented the benefits were instantly apparent. Staff can now retrieve data instantly, just by searching on the screen; they no longer have to spend time looking through hundreds of physical tapes of different shapes and sizes. The automated nature of the online backup solution now means that the management of backup and restore only takes a few mouse-clicks, which has had a dramatic effect on my staff and efficiency.”

He concluded: “We’ve been so impressed with the system that we will be looking to install a second vault at our Edmonton depot as part of our disaster recovery plan.”

^{[Chris Mellor, based on an EVault release.]}