Milton Keynes is one of the UK’s fastest-growing cities. The Open University is leading the three-year MK:Smart initiative to boost growth by minimising strain on the infrastructure as the city expands.
The newly built MK Data Hub is at the very centre of the project: it holds data about energy and water consumption, transport, weather and pollution sourced from satellite technology, sensor networks, social and economic data sets, social media and specialised apps.
The MK:Smart initiative’s success depends on third party applications that use its data; and then Milton Keynes residents adopting those applications to make the most of the city’s resources. The data has to be constantly available and failure to back it up is not an option.
With data located in a multitude of stores and expected to reach multiple terabytes, the Open University needed a scalable and versatile backup and recovery solution.
Arcserve UDP delivers assured recovery through robust backup, disaster recovery, replication and high availability technology. It automatically carries out a full backup of the MK Data Hub once a week in less than 30 minutes and it runs incremental backups on weekdays at four intervals throughout the day, these taking no more than ten minutes. Backups are replicated to a disaster recovery site elsewhere in Milton Keynes for additional data protection.
Arcserve UDP’s unified architecture across virtual and physical environments offers unprecedented ease-of-use via a new, web-based interface and combines backup, replication, high availability and source-based data deduplication technologies in one simple solution. Advanced capabilities enable users to establish, test and improve recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) on-premise, off-premise and in the cloud. It was in fact Arcserve UDP’s comprehensive backup and recovery capabilities – as well as its ability to recover data over a SAN – that convinced The Open University to select it over a number of available alternatives to protect its MK Data Hub. A successful proof of concept demonstrated compression rates of 40 per cent and deduplication rates of 30 per cent, which will increase further as the initiative takes on more data. The Open University then implemented the core Arcserve UDP in less than three days then fine-tuned it to optimise backup and recovery capabilities across its diverse data stores.
Julian Gilbert, MK:Smart senior systems administrator, said: “We need to ensure the data is always available for any project using it in its own application and for the people relying on those applications. With Arcserve UDP MK:Smart data can run 24/7 and it has given us the freedom to be as productive as we need to be at any time. Its remarkable scalability and flexibility will ensure the software adapts in line with our requirements as our levels of data grow.”
Giovanni Goduti, Arcserve sales director Northern Europe, added: "MK:Smart is the first project of its kind – but as resources become increasingly precious there will be a demand for more like it. We’re setting the standard here and Arcserve technology is at the very heart of what the project is doing – helping to manage the infrastructure of an entire city to make sure everyone who lives in Milton Keynes gets the best possible services.”
