Backup Recovery Service

The Southwood Shared Resource Center provides data backup and archive services for eligible users on a daily basis. The standard backup service consists of full, weekly backups, with daily backups taken on an incremental basis. Additionally, the service includes an archive of monthly full backups for a three (3) year period. Backup services are performed in a Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (DDT) process. Data backups are cloned to tape for off-site storage to enable disaster recovery options. The Southwood Shared Resource Center has implemented and maintains high quality, non-disruptive and consistent backup software for managing the process and reporting on any issues encountered. Recovery of data due to hardware, system failure or data integrity failure is managed by the same software, ensuring a successful recovery, allowing a business-to-business result. A standard backup and retention schedule has been established for this service.

Storage Management Service

This service provides a tiered model for customers to enable them to meet their storage needs and requirements at the most cost-effective price. The service includes storage provisioning within Storage Area Network (SAN) disk space and direct attached disk devices, plus management of storage allocations, capacity management, performance management, and 24×7 monitoring of the storage environment. In addition, on-site personnel perform remote monitoring on the managed storage environment.

Customer benefits include:

  • Quality, dedicated attention to storage technology and implementation
  • Multiple levels of storage to meet customers needs
  • Low costs through volume offering and implementation
  • Freeing of customer technical resources to focus on other business and technology issues
  • Supports business continuity requirements
  • RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10 (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) availability
  • Ease of scalability with fast additional space allocation
  • Temporary disk storage allocation for tests and upgrades (when sufficient space is available)

Storage tier offerings are:

  • Tier 1 storage which consists of enterprise-class intelligent Fibre Channel-based storage systems. These disks are high performance, high RPM, cache, RAID protection (usually mirrored), and located within a Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure to provide high availability. This storage is usually used for business-critical or high transaction volume applications which require quick response times.
  • Tier 2 storage is Fibre Channel-based disk, with RAID protection, and either provisioned within the enterprise storage system, or virtualized into modular-class storage system. Servers could be running e-mail applications, data warehouses, or other business important transaction applications.
  • Tier 3 storage uses high-density Serial ATA (SATA) disks with RAID protection, could be either SAN or locally attached storage. This storage is low performance, suitable for static web pages, file shares, tape replacement or archive media.

Tier 1 and 2 storage are fully managed, high performance, fiber channel based SAN disk storage provided for use by all platforms (i.e. Mainframe, Windows, Unix, etc.). Fiber channel storage provides for a higher level of speed and performance than other types of storage.

Tier 3 storage is a lower-performing storage for test and development needs as well as low performance production needs.

Charges are assessed based on allocated Gigabytes per day and Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks configuration.