Disaster Recovery at $10 Billion Brokerage

 

Technologies Used:

  • Jukebox Manager from PoINT Software Systems
  • Plasmon UDO Jukeboxes from Alliance Storage Technologies

As an authorized reseller, BizTech is certified to install, support, and extend every product we represent.

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The Business Challenge

The IT team supporting the finance group of this 40,000-employee brokerage needed high-capacity storage management options for their growing document management system. Additionally, SEC regulations necessitated high availability of their data, as well as data redundancy in case of a disaster impacting their IT facility.

 

The Solution

Having worked with BizTech previously, the client again approached us to help solve their storage and disaster recovery dilemma. BizTech, an Alliance Storage Technologies authorized reseller, recommended utilizing two Plasmon UDO (ultra density optical) jukeboxes, which each had about three times the optical storage capacity of the company’s existing single jukebox and provided significantly more capacity to store electronic invoices and other documents for the brokerage’s finance department.

PoINT Jukebox Manager software from PoINT Software Systems was implemented to write the electronic documents to optical platters. The department’s electronic images are written immediately to optical storage and cached in a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) system for 90 days. This RAID system ensures that the brokerage’s most commonly used documents are immediately accessible. Documents that are less routinely accessed (typically, images that are more than 90 days old) are available via nearline storage.

To bring the company into compliance with SEC regulations, BizTech included a disaster recovery system as part of the solution. For redundancy, copies of the platters are made and then transferred to a disaster recovery site. This site contains a Plasmon UDO with a single drive controlled by another copy of PoINT software that can load images onto the company’s backup server if data at the company’s offices is destroyed. In the event of a catastrophe, the brokerage can simply take the latest platter, put it into the single drive, and rewrite the most recent information back to the hard drive, making the data almost immediately available to staff.