Gary Johnson
Carlson Companies
Architectural Consultant
Minneapolis, Minn.
www.carlson.com
Manager’s Profile: Backup systems architect for the main data center facility of $6.7 billion travel and hospitality company, whose brands include Radisson Hotels & Resorts and T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants.
The Challenge: The company needs to move 20 to 25 terabytes of data to tape at least once a week from the servers at its Minneapolis headquarters, but the existing infrastructure has been barely able to complete a full backup within 24 hours.
How He Accomplished It: based on those backup needs, Johnson and his team decided it was most cost-effective to move to faster and higher-capacity Linear Tape Open (LTO) drives in Carlson’s two StorageTek L700 libraries rather than make a wholesale replacement with a larger system. “We just couldn’t justify the leap,” Johnson says.
Project Details: Replacing the 40 Quantum Digital Linear Tape (DLT) 7000 drives (which the manufacturer has discontinued) in the L700 libraries with eight IBM Ultrium LTO 2 drives. Initiated last July, the project is scheduled to be completed by the end of March.
Space Savings: Each LTO 2 tape cartridge holds 200 gigabytes of data, compared with 35 gigabytes for DLT 7000. That higher density will let Carlson eliminate four older Storage-Tek 9700-series libraries—freeing up roughly 164 square feet of data center floor space.
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