Logicalis

FT selects Logicalis for data recovery solution

The Client

FT Interactive Data is a leading provider of financial information and analytical software to the global investment community. Its Exshare securities database not only supplies the market pages of the Financial Times but also provides City institutions with the intelligence they need to conduct transactions and manage their portfolios.

FT Interactive Data specialises in collecting, editing and maintaining 'hard to get' data on a wide range of financial securities from developed and emerging markets worldwide. This information is delivered to clients via direct feeds, a variety of web-based tools and third party software.

The company employs 1,600 people in more than 20 offices worldwide, generating revenues of $276 million in the year 2000.

The Challenge

Maintaining such an extensive information asset would be a major challenge for any organisation. But in an industry where even the temporary loss of data can have serious repercussions, the need for secure, accurate and timely back-up management is critical.

Award-winning IBM reseller Logicalis was able to demonstrate the skills and product knowledge to address the requirements of FT Interactive Data for an enhanced back-up and recovery solution in a complex open systems environment.

Faced with a rapid expansion of its database services, the company opted to add more capability to its existing back-up and recovery solution through a combination of ADSM and high capacity IBM Magstar cartridge drives recommended by Logicalis.

Following a pilot exercise, the conversion to ADSM proved straightforward.

The Solution

Ken Waite, Technical Support Manager for FT Interactive Data, comments: "We found the solution to be reliable and simple to use. The enhanced capacity of the Magstar cartridges, combined with ADSM's powerful consolidation features, meant that copies of our daily incremental back-ups could be held on a reduced number of cartridges inside the Silo, with duplicates stored off-site. This substantially improved our recovery times. At the same time, by utilising the cartridge slots in the Silo more efficiently we were able to expand our database storage on the Unix platform from 1.5TB to 5.5TB over a six-month period without incurring incremental costs or loss of performance."

With the rebranding of ADSM as Tivoli Storage Management (TSM) in 1999, further enhancements to the system became possible. Logicalis was instrumental in planning and implementing the migration of FT Interactive Data's RS Systemp, Sun and HP Unix systems from ADSM to TSM servers and applications.

Employing a TSM server sited on an SP node and six Magstar cartridge drives installed in the StorageTek Silo, the current implementation provides up to 11TB of back-up for Oracle and Sybase database applications across a wide range of hardware platforms.

FT Interactive Data is also piloting the use of TSM's Archiving features to improve the retrieval of real time trading data coming into the organisation on their Stratus platform from stock exchanges worldwide. Currently, critical production trading data is held on a Stratus Continuum fault tolerant mainframe for five days. Once tests have been completed, this data will be transferred to the SP server and archived under the more robust TSM solution. As a result 20% of Stratus disk space will be freed and the archive retrieval time for data more than five days old will also be improved.

A further benefit of the TSM migration strategy has been the implementation of automated OS back-up and recovery for the company's Sun and HP servers. Using this facility, the Sun and HP OS is backed up to SSA disks attached to the SP's management server (the Control Work Station). If a Sun or HP server needs to be rebuilt, a 'bare metal' OS restore, complete with the TSM agent, is performed from this node, after which, if necessary, the applications and data can be restored using TSM.

Having established TSM as the solution of choice for such a complex and sensitive business environment, Logicalis recently provided FT Interactive Data with high level consultancy for the next stage of its data recovery strategy.

Ken Waite explains: "The goal is to connect all our production UNIX servers and disk subsystems through fibre links, allowing even faster access to TSM across all hardware platforms and increased data throughput."

"A subset of the Magstar CART drives has been fibre-attached to the SAN to allow FT Interactive Data to gain experience of managing back-up and recovery in this way before implementing full SAN-free back-up. Once that has been achieved Tivoli products will provide the back-up solution, alerting framework and SAN management for all future applications in the UNIX environment."

The Bottom Line

FTID, part of the Financial Times Group, collects, edits and maintains 'hard to get' data on a wide range of financial securities.

The company employs 1600 people in more than 20 offices worldwide. In an industry where even temporary loss of data can have serious repercussions, FTID required a fast, reliable back-up and retrieval system.

Logicalis implemented an 11TB backup system based on a TSM server on an SP node and six Magstar cartridge drives installed in the StorageTek Silo.