From storage quotas to free capacity
Deduplication and snapshots enhance storage at Swedish National Defence College
The Swedish National Defence College was forced to introduce storage quotas to ensure that its backup and storage systems would not crash. But with deduplication technology and a new storage platform from Proact, the Swedish National Defence College has been able to free up capacity and reduce its storage management costs.
"...we have been able to reduce our need for disk by 20-25 %..."
The Proact solution is based on a NetApp clustered disk system in a virtualised VMware environment. Storage is mirrored to a secondary system in another location, resulting in superb disaster protection. In the event of a system failure, all data can be recovered quickly from the secondary system. The tape robot that used to be a central element of the College's storage solution is still there, but now it is used more or less just for archiving.
"I should think we have been able to reduce our need for disk capacity by 20-25 % for home directories, e-mail, shared project areas, etc. thanks to deduplication. And what is more, we have made an even greater saving – 60 % – as regards applications,” says Christian Johansson, IT Operations Manager at the Swedish National Defence College.
