Military Mutual Aid Association (MMAA) - FalconStor
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Case Study Industry Government, Military, Financial IT Environment MIS systems: SAP/R3 ERP/EKP and others Internet portal VoIP, IT, IC card Challenges Need to protect data in the event of disaster 170,000 members in need of continuous data and business availability LAN-based backup of data was management-intensive and difficult to complete within backup window FalconStor Solution IPStor® Server w/FC support (Linux dual CPU) Active-Active Failover option Replication option DiskSafe™ Replication TimeMark® Snapshot option Snapshot Agents Compression Encryption CallHome option DynaPath® Benefits Replicates 100GB of data per day from data center to DR site Protects data throughout entire organization Centralized storage management reduces management costs and staff requirements, optimizes use of resources Consolidated heterogeneous operating system and applications management Future-proof architecture with high scalability levels > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > “The FalconStor® IPStor® platform has astonishingly improved our entire backup management system. And now that we can manage two primary centers with our small staff, it provides significant cost benefits as well.” Hee-Chul Lee, Infrastructure and Operation Team Manager, MMAA Military Mutual Aid Association (MMAA) The largest Korean military association uses FalconStor® IPStor® software platform to create a two-way disaster recovery (DR) system Background The Military Mutual Aid Association (MMAA) was established in 1984 to enhance Korea’s armed forces by ensuring a more stable life for soldiers and civilian employees. The MMAA offers a membership savings program and provides funding for education, healthcare, and disaster relief. In addition, MMAA participates in financial invest- ments and construction projects, and contributes to Korea’s economic development. Never complacent about its achievements, the MMAA is committed to continual improvement while maintaining a “members-first” policy as its core value. Challenge The MMAA has firmly established itself as a valuable service provider for the military, supporting 170,000 members. With thousands of lives and billions of dollars in assets at stake, the MMAA needed to set up a disaster recovery (DR) system for business continuity to protect against system failure or site-level disaster. Though many organizations use one-way DR, the MMAA wanted to set up a two- way DR system. In two-way DR, asynchronous mirroring enables replication between two sites. However, the company’s existing LAN-based system made it difficult to manage and complete backups within a narrow timeframe. FalconStor Solution MMAA deployed FalconStor IPStor software to create a two-way DR system that replicates 100GB of data per day from the data center to a remote site. With the assistance of FalconStor Professional Services, MMAA used the IPStor virtualization platform to build a SAN that supports Sun Solaris, Windows 2003, Red Hat Linux, and IBM AIX 5.3 servers. To ensure high system availability, four IPStor servers are deployed in an active-active failover configuration. MMAA leverages active-active failover capabilities of IPStor for fault tolerance. Should one IPStor appliance or path fail, the other immediately and transparently takes over the workload without impacting processes. When the primary IPStor appliance is back online, failback occurs automatically.
Transcript of Military Mutual Aid Association (MMAA) - FalconStor
Case Study
IndustryGovernment, Military, Financial
IT EnvironmentMIS systems: SAP/R3 ERP/EKP and othersInternet portalVoIP, IT, IC card
ChallengesNeed to protect data in the event of disaster 170,000 members in need of continuous data and business availabilityLAN-based backup of data was management-intensive and difficult to complete within backup window
FalconStor SolutionIPStor® Server w/FC support (Linux dual CPU)
Active-Active Failover optionReplication optionDiskSafe™ Replication TimeMark® Snapshot optionSnapshot Agents Compression Encryption CallHome optionDynaPath®
BenefitsReplicates 100GB of data per day from data center to DR siteProtects data throughout entire organization Centralized storage management reduces management costs and staff requirements, optimizes use of resources Consolidated heterogeneous operating system and applications managementFuture-proof architecture with high scalability levels
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“The FalconStor® IPStor® platform has astonishingly improved our entire backup management system. And now that we can manage two primary centers with our small staff, it provides significant cost benefits as well.”
Hee-Chul Lee, Infrastructure and Operation Team Manager, MMAA
Military Mutual Aid Association (MMAA)The largest Korean military association uses FalconStor® IPStor® software platform to create a two-way disaster recovery (DR) system
BackgroundThe Military Mutual Aid Association (MMAA) was established in 1984 to enhance Korea’s armed forces by ensuring a more stable life for soldiers and civilian employees. The MMAA offers a membership savings program and provides funding for education, healthcare, and disaster relief. In addition, MMAA participates in financial invest-ments and construction projects, and contributes to Korea’s economic development. Never complacent about its achievements, the MMAA is committed to continual improvement while maintaining a “members-first” policy as its core value.
Challenge The MMAA has firmly established itself as a valuable service provider for the military, supporting 170,000 members. With thousands of lives and billions of dollars in assets at stake, the MMAA needed to set up a disaster recovery (DR) system for business continuity to protect against system failure or site-level disaster.
Though many organizations use one-way DR, the MMAA wanted to set up a two-way DR system. In two-way DR, asynchronous mirroring enables replication between two sites. However, the company’s existing LAN-based system made it difficult to manage and complete backups within a narrow timeframe.
FalconStor SolutionMMAA deployed FalconStor IPStor software to create a two-way DR system that replicates 100GB of data per day from the data center to a remote site. With the assistance of FalconStor Professional Services, MMAA used the IPStor virtualization platform to build a SAN that supports Sun Solaris, Windows 2003, Red Hat Linux, and IBM AIX 5.3 servers.
To ensure high system availability, four IPStor servers are deployed in an active-active failover configuration. MMAA leverages active-active failover capabilities of IPStor for fault tolerance. Should one IPStor appliance or path fail, the other immediately and transparently takes over the workload without impacting processes. When the primary IPStor appliance is back online, failback occurs automatically.
For more information, visit www.falconstor.com or contact your local FalconStor representative.
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Case Study
By deploying IPStor software as the intelligent infrastructure for its SAN environment, the MMAA has significantly reduced storage management costs and dramatically increased storage efficiency and availability. IPStor software protects data throughout the entire system including the DR site. Its storage consolidation feature maximizes MMAA’s storage resource utilization while dramatically simplifying management. Storage management is now centralized at the Java-based IPStor Console. Instead of requiring numerous staff members to manage storage and backup at each server, the same operations can be accomplished by one or two people at the main IT center. This has made administrators’ use of time much more efficient, freeing them up for other critical tasks.
Furthermore, TimeMark Snapshot technology has eliminated the risk involved with routine individual system tasks such as operating system updates, copying service packs, and so on – tasks which are, at best, tedious when errors occur in the process, and at worst, can result in data loss.
The robust scalability of the IPStor-based storage environment allows MMAA to expand its high performance storage management model to other remote sites at any time. In addition to this expansion, MMAA plans to deploy FalconStor® Continuous Data Protection (CDP) in the near future to enable continuous availability through ongoing replication and any-point-in-time recovery.
Business Benefits
Copyright © 2007 FalconStor Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved. FalconStor Software, IPStor, TimeMark, DiskSafe, and DynaPath and their respective logos are registered trademarks of FalconStor Software, Inc. All other company and product names contained herein are trademarks of the respective holders. CSMMMA071212
Two-way (duplex) DR with IPStor virtualization platform
Hardware Configuration
4 IPStor appliances4EA DELL PE6850
(SLP 9.3/2.6.11.4-6-smp)2 Pentium Xeon 3.4 GHz/512KB
(L2 cache, 8GB RAM)2 QLogic QLA2462/2 port/4Gb/s
FC HBAs4EA Brocade 32 port switches2EA EMC CX700 (6TB)1EA Hitachi 9500V (3TB)22 application servers:
10 Microsoft Windows 20037 Sun Solaris3 RedHat Linux2 IBM AIX 5.3
In the event of potential system failure, the IPStor® TimeMark® Snapshot option analyzes and identifies the cause of the issues to protect data. Working in conjunction with application-aware Snapshot Agents, this option ensures the transactional consistency for MMAA’s web, database, and MIS applications. An administrator can take a snapshot of the virtual drive before any tasks are carried out. If necessary, data can be restored immediately for business continuity.
The IPStor platform’s compression and encryption options aid in remote replication, enabling sites to efficiently replicate data across any distance via IP to same or dissimilar hardware for rapid recovery and continuous business operations during a disaster. As such, they are the essential components to MMAA’s DR strategy, offering high levels of performance and data integrity.
