Archiving success leads to backup deployment

To cope with increasing compliance demands, utility provider ActewAGL has deployed an archiving and backup system with search and recovery capabilities.

The organisation offers a broad range of utilities including electricity, natural gas, water and wastewater. It also manages TransACT, effectively offering telecommunications services such as telephony, data and video to residential, business and government customers in the ACT.

With such a wide range of services, the company needed an archiving system that would remove mail box quotas and provide a fully compliant system for searching and recovering data. The company’s Manager of Enterprise Systems, Geoff Gailer, explains.

“We primarily wanted to relieve users from the onerous mailbox quotas we had been forced to apply, we had too much mail simply sitting in everyone’s mailbox clogging up the system,” Gailer says.

While email archiving was the primary impetus for the new system, ActewAGL also wanted to archive database information and data files.

ActewAGL reviewed several archiving offerings, ultimately deciding on a CommVault system. “We liked the ease of use of the CommVault archiving product and the increased functionality of the powerful search, compliance and management capability,” Gailer says.

“Just the one archiving product can be managed by the user and ensures that all data can be retrieved either by the user themselves or by management when discovery or compliance issues arise.”

According to Gailer the implementation, which took place throughout 2007, was so successful that the company decided to implement CommVault’s backup facilities also.

“We saw we could add backup and recovery and replication and resource management and use the existing common technology engine that came with the archiving product, one pane of glass to control all processes at no additional cost overhead,” he says.

ActewAGL replaced the existing product with the Galaxy Data Protection suite and added Continuous Data Replicator (CDR) later in 2007.

The system replicates data to the remote site in Dickson for disaster recovery purposes, while offering continuous data protection with roll-back points.

Gailer says the new system has resulted in two main returns. Firstly, the licensing costs are substantially less than in the previous system.

Secondly, the unified structure of the new system gives users more power. This means all tech support can be done through the help desk, rather than higher cost IT specialists. Also, users can set policies for data retention themselves and do searches to retrieve data.