Irish Life puts store in new IT backup system


24 Oct 2006

Irish Life & Permanent (IL&P) has implemented a new storage management system as part of a long-term backup and disaster recovery strategy.

The system was supplied by Sun and will centralise the management of the financial provider’s backup operations, reduce its storage management costs and support the company’s disaster recovery plans.

IL&P chose the system — which includes two Sun StorageTek Streamline SL8500 tape libraries and Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager system — as it had been planning a group-wide consolidation and rationalisation of its technology and services infrastructure to better meet the needs of its business.

According to Brendan Healy, chief information officer with IL&P, the financial services sector is currently experiencing huge growth in the volume of data. He added that this growth is likely to continue because of compliance and industry regulation issues. “We chose Sun for its technical strengths but also for the way it acted as a trusted advisor during the project,” said Healy. “Sun engaged its professional services organisation who carried out an in-depth analysis of both our business and technical requirements before then delivering the best solution to meet these requirements.”

The system will help with the virtualisation of IL&P’s mainframe tape environment and, it is claimed, will deliver a significant reduction in media usage and cost. It will also allow for cross-site recovery for business continuity purposes. The solution provides a roadmap for future drive and virtualisation technology resulting in a single library platform across all IL&P platforms.

By Gordon Smith