Computer backup at Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research

Ostseeforschung

Predecessor of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research was the Institute for Oceanography Warnemünde, which, as a member of the German Academy of Sciences, was for many decades the only Institute for Oceanography in the German Democratic Republic. Since its re-establishment, the activities of the Institute have been particularly focused on the Baltic Sea ecosystem.

The Institute is divided into four sections – Physical Oceanography, Marine Chemistry, Biological Oceanography and Marine Geology. The workgroup Measurement Technology is part of the Physical Oceanography section. Jointly all sections cooperate on a long-term research program.

The Institute for Oceanography Warnemünde is a research institute of the Scientific Association Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, which is funded jointly by the German Federal Government and by the federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. As a co-institute it is part of the University of Rostock. Its male and female professors are teaching there in the departments of Biology, Chemistry and Physics. The professors of the Marine Geology Section are teaching at Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University in Greifswald.

The Mission

IOWLOGOIMTEXT

For the backup of local data of initially 137 workstations, IOW uses Atempo LiveBackup software in combination with a EUROstor ES-6600 SATA RAID system. More and more workstations are then added successively, finally resulting in the permanent backup of about 250 workstations and notebooks with this software and on the server.

Ample disk storage space also allows backup of image data and other media files of those departments generating such material in the context of their work. The respective rules may be established for each individual case, since LiveBackup allows to define at group or user level which types of data from which directories are to be saved or excluded from backup.

All changes of data are buffered on the computer itself – thus providing that even accidental deletion may be reversed immediately – and, as soon as time and network ressources are available, the respective data changes are saved on the RAID system.

The Solution

All the data on a EUROstor ES-6600 SCSI/SATA RAID system with RAID 6, connected to a central backup server, are backed up. SATA hard disks, particularly if backed up by RAID 6, are entirely sufficient for the data backup although they are saved in a data base, since the changed data of each computer are collected in a buffer and then, bit by bit, saved in the background.

Atempo LiveBackup:

  • Continuous Data Protection: changes are immediately saved in the cache

  • Identical system files are only saved once

  • Positive and negative filters for directories and file types

  • “bare-metal disaster recovery”: Reconstruction of a computer including all system files

  • Generation of bootable CDs possible in order to recover non-bootable computers

IOWSkizzeIMTEXT

Customers Voice

“Above all we appreciate the great flexibility of LiveBackup”, says Claus Wulff, EDP Area Manager at the Institute for Baltic Sea Research. „In the past our employees had to have all their computers connected and running at night in order to allow data backup to take place.

You can imagine that this never really worked – least of all with notebooks. Moreover we do no longer have any problems with the backup window now.”

In the winter 2005/2006 the system was installed in Warnemünde by EUROstor and was then expanded step by step.

FURTHER REFERENCES