Airline takes off with HP Data Protector

Continental needed backup of 50T to 100TB in capacity

Devin York, senior manager for Continental Airlines in hurricane-prone Houston, was looking for a data protection solution that he could use to backup his heterogeneous network consisting of Oracle and SQL Server databases, ProLiant servers and blade servers running Windows, mid-tier Unix systems and HP Enterprise Virtual Array Storage.

"We were looking for a SAN-based solution that could integrate with the SAN and integrate with Oracle and SQL Server and manage the tape library," says York. "The product we had just couldn't do it."

With almost 1PB of space consumed by backups in the past year, York was looking for a continuous backup solution that could backup his Oracle archive logs hourly, take incremental backups every night and do a full backup every few days.

"How we backup depends on the business-criticality of the application," York says .

York chose HP's Data Protector software in 2000 to backup his business and the storage on his network, which consists of 50T to 100TB in capacity.

At present, York isn't using Data Protector to replicate data for disaster recovery. Continental has two buildings in downtown Houston.

"Our thinking is where we want to put the next recovery center," York says . "Today, we would just get the tapes and move them to a disaster recovery site in Conroe, Texas and use that for disaster recovery." (Conroe is about 45 miles from Houston.)

York has also implemented disk-based backup as a supplement to tape. "We've had to since the backup windows have gotten so small. With the database and storage growth we've had, a full backup will take 8 to 10 hours, so it's quicker to get the data back from disk," York says .

York's storage is mirrored between two buildings. To backup his databases, he breaks the mirrors and brings up users on the other mirror before backing up.

"HP Data Protector is one of the best values out there -- it's extremely affordable." An agent runs on each server in the network and integrates with Oracle's RMAN technology.

• Data Center
• Continental Airlines
• HP Data Protector
• network storage