DRW Investments Implements Ibac And Idealstor To Replicate Critical Data

By Idealstor LLC

DRW Trading Group had critical data located at each of their major locations in Chicago and London. It had been determined that the company needed to implement a disaster recovery solution that would allow them to backup their data at each location as well as replicate data between locations. The major drivers of this project were having an effective replication solution that could be used for local backups as well as site to site replication. This solution needed to be reliable enough to backup all of their onsite data, but also needed to be fast enough to backup and replicate their data quickly between locations on different continents. They needed to come up with a solution that would enhance their existing backup infrastructure at each location to be able to handle these new requirements. This project resulted from the desire to implement sound internal business practices as well as meeting regulatory requirements for having offsite and secure copies of their data.

The DRW Trading Group implemented Idealstor solutions for both their hardware and software requirements. For the hardware component of this project, DRW implemented the Idealstor 8 Bay Backup Appliance in both Chicago and London. The 8 Bay allows them to run up to 8 simultaneous backups for a total of 3.2TB of data. The 8 drives can be used as removable media or be left in the system to provide nearline access to backup data. DRW uses the 8 Bay partially as a storage device and partially as the method for taking data offsite. They were able to implement the 8 Bay into their existing architecture without making any major changes to their network.

For the software component of this project, DRW implemented Ibac Data Protection Software, also developed by Idealstor. Ibac is a high speed backup and replication software that backs up data in its native format and only requires one license be installed on the Idealstor Appliance to backup all of their data. Ibac also has the ability to backup open files with the use of Open Volume Snapshot (OVS)