ETI-NET's BackBox is the Winning Ticket for Loto-Québec
Loto-Québec is the Province of Quebec’s state corporation that operates several gambling activities (lotteries, video lotteries, CD-ROM-based lotteries, televised lotteries, casinos, network bingo) since 1969. For the 2003-2004 fiscal year, based on revenues of $3.760 billion, it paid $1.493 billion in the form of profits to the Québec government and $979.4 million in the form of lottery and bingo winnings. All lotteries and game are managed with the HP NonStop system. Loto-Québec has a primary site and a recovery site both located in the Montréal region. In both sites they have one S7416 NonStop system. The NonStop system processes on the average between 1,000 to 3,000 transactions per minute for all lotteries with peak time running from 5,000 to 7,000 transactions per minute. In 2004, Loto-Québec was preparing to switch to a new application to manage its games and lotteries. This application needed to backup much more data. The data consist mostly of online dumps and audit trails and would need to be backed up efficiently and securely. It quickly became apparent that their old equipments of eight 9490 tape drives would not be sufficient to handle the new volume of data in the time allocated. The old application generated about 20 to 30 cartridges per day; they quickly established that the new one would need around 300 cartridges every day with the expected increase in expenses for media, vault real estate and transport. Loto-Québec had a requirement of 100GB of data to backup each day. Of that, they had to be able to backup 30GB in 30 minutes during time of high CPU load with many tasks running at the same time (Ticket sales transaction processing, archiving and DB reload). The remaining 70GB could be done in 3 hours time window at a lower priority setting. A newer tape technology would have, of course, met their needs in terms of throughput however the cost in media and media storage would still have been prohibitive. So Loto-Québec investigated the different virtual tape solutions offered on the market. They settled on BackBox because it was the fastest, the most stable and flexible solution. Performance was of course paramount in their requirement and on that score BackBox was the hands down winner. The BackBox easily handles 30GB in 30minutes through 8 virtual tape drives while the 16 CPUs are running at 100%. In day-to-day real life condition each tape drive can easily reach 400MB/min. Loto-Québec had acquired an HP EVA 5000 SAN with a 25TB capacity and they were very satisfied to learn that they could easily connect the BackBox to the SAN and use it as a repository for the virtual media. They just needed to add some fiber cards adapter to the BackBox and the SAN was immediatly available to store the virtual volume. The BackBox was the only product that let them use the SAN storage that easily. The choice of the ETI-Net solution met all Loto-Québec requirements and so they decided to acquire 6 BackBoxes, each equipped with two dual port HVD SCSI card. Three BackBoxes were installed at each site; each connected to the ServerNet/DA ports on the NonStop. The BackBoxes were set in a high availability configuration. Each BackBox writes to its own area of 400GB of the SAN but shares it with the others so that a virtual media can be restored from any BackBox. Each BackBox SAN area is backed up by Veritas NetBackup and virtual media older than 3 days are deleted from the SAN to make space. As opposed to the 200 to 300 cartridge that would have been necessary, the whole operation needs only one or two LTO cartridge per day. If a virtual media that has been deleted from the SAN is requested by Guardian, then the BackBox automatically triggers the restore from NetBackup to SAN storage without human intervention. Loto-Québec appreciates also that there is only one step necessary to define virtual media both to the BackBox and to Mediacom or TMF/DR. This makes it a lot easier and avoids mistakes. The BackBox also fits really well with the expertise at Loto-Québec. Being hosted on HP DL380 server and running Windows 2003, it did not introduce any new support issue to the data center. Which bring us to the final point, not only was BackBox a clear winner in term of performance, flexibility and ease of use but it was also the most cost effective solution according to Loto-Québec.
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