The company backs up about half of its corporate data across three SANs, which are located at data centers in Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala., and Inverness, Ala. The amount of data backed up to these SANs is increasing, while remote sites are starting to back up their data to regional hub sites instead of locally. Backing up their data to the SANs via the corporate WAN requires too much bandwidth.
SANity CHECK
Southern is in the process of consolidating its SAN software with Veritas' Storage Migrator. It's also moving its backup to a single software platform, Veritas NetBackup, replacing separate packages for its legacy and Windows NT data (Arcserv and Legato). Storage Migrator manages storage parameters, backup and restore, and archiving. The company says it hopes to finish converting its roughly 400 corporate servers, as well as its remote sites, to regional hub backups within the two years.
The Veritas backup software already has sped up backups for the utility. It used to take four days to back up a 3-TB Windows NT server cluster; with Veritas NetBackup, it takes just 24 hours, Park says. "And we still want to shrink that window even further," he adds.
Moreover, the new software will let Southern finally manage backups centrally, Park says. The goal is to have software agents sitting on remote-site servers and feeding data back to a central management console to handle outage alerts and other problems. That way, the company can eliminate as many local backups as possible and prevent backup-and-restore problems before they occur.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
