Girl Scouts box up new IT flavor: Data de-duplicationa

Set to celebrate its 100th anniversary in just five years, the Girl Scouts of the United States of America are already looking to the future and how they can better manage critical data growth by incorporating new de-duplication capabilities in their backup and recovery appliances.

Bob O'Connor, CTO of the Girl Scouts, said that the New York-based nonprofit organization will replace its REO 9500 virtual tape library (VTL) appliance from Overland Storage for a new REO 9500D by the end of November. The REO 9500D appliance, which incorporates de-duplication functionality, has been in test phase for the past month in his shop, he noted.

The disk-based REO 9500D appliance was introduced this week by Overland and backed by a new reseller agreement with Diligent Technologies Corp. Targeted at small-to-midsize businesses, the new VTL appliance offers Diligent's in-band de-duplication algorithm called HyperFactor, according to Jeff Graham, a senior product manager at San Diego-based Overland.

Overland's REO 9500D is currently available, with pricing starting at $65,400 for a 3.75TB capacity, Graham said.

The Girl Scouts is currently in the midst of "major" two-year consolidation initiative to reduce the number of its Support Councils across the country from 290 to 109, O'Connor said. Support Councils are subgroups that report and feed information about their region's activities to the main headquarters. The organization's data center resides in Manhattan and supports remote offices in Georgia; Washington, D.C.; New Jersey; and Westchester County, N.Y.

The IT facility includes about 120 servers that are predominantly from HP running Microsoft Windows, as well as a significant number of Microsoft SQL Server database instances. The organization's largest database and the data warehouse behind it, which holds all of data on the 4 million active members of the Girl Scouts (3 million girls and 1 million adults), are O'Connor's biggest areas of concern.

"Most of the growth we've seen has been in our data warehouse. Right now, it's probably half a terabyte due to all the multimedia activities we've been doing," he said. "As an estimate, we're probably over 50% [data] growth over the last year or two."

O'Connor said his IT group plans to build out the data warehouse in order to store every byte of Girl Scouts' membership data indefinitely. Currently, the data warehouse's membership information dates back 10 years. The active database only carries the past five years of membership data.

By adding built-in de-duplication to his Overland storage, O'Connor expects to boost productivity by reducing tape manipulation, keep more backup data stored on disk and extend data-retention capabilities.

"We do have off-site storage, so the fewer tapes I have to recall, the better off I'll be. In terms of disk-to-disk backup technology, that's really important because it lets me serve my customers faster and cut down backup windows much smaller than we're used to," O'Connor said.

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