Backups were taking longer and longer to complete, and IT specialists were constantly having to turn out to secure the data store. The situation at military vehicle manufacturer BAE Systems Hägglunds in Örnsköldsvik finally turned out to be untenable. But a new storage platform from Proact resolved the problems.
“Now it is almost hard to remember just how bad our system was before,” says Björn Ramqvist, IT engineer at BAE Systems Hägglunds and the man responsible for procurement of the new storage platform.
BAE Systems Hägglunds in Örnsköldsvik develop and manufacture military vehicle systems and have enjoyed major export successes with their tracked vehicles and combat vehicles. The company is part of the British defence group BAE Systems and employs some 1 000 staff in Örnsköldsvik. The company handles large information volumes in the form of design documentation, drawings, images and business documents, among other things, many of which are subject to stringent confidentiality procedures as defence secrets.
This is why the company’s information management is surrounded by rigorous security requirements and its servers are kept in rooms with what is known as spurious data transmission security. This prevents outsiders from being able to capture the radio waves given off by all servers.
To streamline the company’s information management, the storage environment was virtualised a few years ago. This virtualisation had an effect, but the backups were taking longer and longer to execute – almost 24 hours – on the file servers. Working in the system was often slow, which resulted in a lot of frustration among staff.
“It was so slow that our business was affected. At the same time, here in the IT department we were forced to spend lots of time securing the storage and looking after the tape robots. If any of our engineers managed to delete a document, we first had to try to identify the server it was on, then we had to go back to the backup tapes. And moreover, we could only recover documents from the latest backup, which might have taken place 12 hours before,” says Björn Ramqvist.
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