Acxiom Corporation Finds Solution To Back Up And Restore 100 TB Of Data On A Multi-Platform Environment
As the UNIX team leader for the financial services division for the $964 million provider of mailing list and data integration services, Acxiom Corporation's Betty Owen has 100 TB of data to back up and the clock is ticking. She is responsible for the care and feeding of a number of Unix-based data warehouses critical to the company's international strategic marketing and promotion efforts. Her primary requirement is to manage the backup of its expanding Oracle databases within a shrinking backup window. The company supports a variety of Compaq Alpha servers (e.g., 4100, ES40, 8400, GS140, GS80, and GS320) with a growing number of Sun Enterprise class servers and IBM servers. A few of the applications currently on the servers were mainframe legacy applications that the company ported to a client-server environment.
Acxiom maintains a number of Oracle data warehouses, ranging from 25 TB to less than 2 TB, that supply large prospect databases that the company uses for dynamic data mining, real-time prospecting, and customer relationship management. A team of 12 Unix systems engineers supports the systems on a 7x24 basis. A major challenge has been how to back up and restore the quickly expanding data warehouses in a multi-platform network environment. The company also maintains a large and growing robotic tape library. The tape devices are distributed throughout the company, with the majority of them residing within the company's Conway, Arkansas location. Due to security requirements, the majority of the division's tape devices are direct-connected to servers dedicated to individual customers.