The amounts of information just went on growing, and in the end pharmaceutical company Biovitrum was unable to complete its weekly backups over the weekend. When the company then also decided to move to new premises where there was no space for their old tape robot, it was time to review their storage platform.
A solution from Proact rectified the problems and allowed the company to retain parts of its existing storage environment.
“The new solution is allowing us to save a lot of storage space by helping us to avoid duplicates. At the same time, backup and storage management is considerably faster and more streamlined,” says Jesper Bondesson, IT architect at Biovitrum and the man responsible for implementation of the solution.Biovitrum is a Swedish pharmaceutical company which focuses on the development and production of specialist medications for rare diseases.
The company had a turnover in excess of SEK 1 billion in 2008 and employs some 450 staff, of whom 170 work with research. Biovitrum products are marketed andsold internationally. A large proportion of its operations are controlled by quality systems regulated by the Medical Products Agency in Sweden and its American counterpart, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).
These rules set stringent requirements for documentation. One example: all side-effects experienced have to be reported to the countries where the company’s medications are sold. Biovitrum has seen growing information volumes over the past few years, and its storage and backup systems have been under a lot of strain. Most of its stored data is static and includes raw data such as text files and chromatography images from lab instruments.
Despite this, new backups of the same information were being made regularly. Even the file servers were starting to be overloaded, and Biovitrum was constantly being forced to increase its disk capacity. This was partly due to the fact that the number of duplicates in the systems was growing. Backups could take 24 hours or more, and restore times were unreasonably long.
“An ordinary full backup was no less than 10-12 terabytes in size, and the volumes just kept on growing. We also had to spend a lot of time working on the tape robot, and so we realised we needed a new storage platform. Then because we were about to move to new premises and were unable to take our old tape robot with us, we needed a flexible solution,” says Jesper Bondesson.
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