Imagine deploying a technology that can cut data backup by 75% and makes the backup time a matter of minutes, rather than hours.

That’s exactly the result the California Emergency Management Agency (Cal EMA) achieved with IBM technology.

Cal EMA oversees of state agency response to major disasters and is tagged with assuring the state's readiness to respond to and recover from all hazards and helping local governments with emergency preparedness, response, recovery and hazard mitigation efforts.

So of course there is a growing mountain of data that needs support and archiving on everything from physical assets across the state to reimbursement for damages and real-time data collected by satellite across California's 58 counties. The agency had been consistently consolidating and managing all this data on virtual machines and wanted a faster, more cost-effective backup system.

It’s using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager's centralized, policy-based, enterprise class, data backup and recovery software and rolled out the virtual storage optimization solution from Pancetera to extend Tivoli's capabilities into VMware's virtual environment. Pancetera software recognizes unique new data that needs to be backed up, eliminating the need to move large amounts of empty space and redundant data.

"Our mission is to be working when everyone and everything isn’t, so we needed a backup and recovery solution that can give us timely, reliable data," said Lovell Hopper, manager, Infrastructure Services, Cal EMA.

The IBM-Pancetera solution resulted in 75% reduction in data backup, and sliced backup time required.

"Our new backup combination allows us to master our virtual and physical infrastructure by backing up data with greater ease and speed," said Hopper.

In the virtual environment a full 'snapshot' of the data would require about 15 to 20 terabytes of data to be backed up each time. With Pancetera's SmartRead technology, Cal EMA has significantly reduced the I/O load and bandwidth on its storage and network and there is no need for staged backups or agents in the virtual machine. That saves bucks on supporting proxy storage while still being able to rely on Tivoli Storage Manager for managing and optimizing the backup and recovery solution.

It's just another example of what IBM can do, and does do, for today’s data intensive environments.