Schiavello to build second Melbourne data centre

Melbourne-based furniture manufacturer Schiavello is in the planning stages for a second data centre as it looks to improve disaster recovery capability.

Schiavello head of network and support, Carl Dittloff, said that the second facility in Melbourne would be built using a mix of staff expertise and contractors, as the company prefers to manage its own IT projects, rather than outsource them.

“We have a large manufacturing site at Tullamarine [Melbourne] so the plan is to build the data centre onsite,” he said. “It is still at the design phase but we expect it to be complete by Q2 of 2012.”

“This new facility will be a complete replication of the data centre at our Melbourne headquarters which provides global services to the rest of the group such as email, databases and Citrix offerings.”

The company is also considering a transition from tape libraries to disk. Dittloff said that one of the trials it was running at present was backing up data across a wide area network (WAN) to a disk repository in Tullamarine which eliminates the tape backup on its other sites in Sydney, Canberra and Queensland.

“If we don’t have a local copy of the backup data on the remote site office we can’t do a very quick restore because we have to restore across the WAN,” Dittloff said. “Our goal is to eventually eliminate all of the tape backups in the remote offices.”

Dittloff said he expected the transition over to disk would take up to 18 months. “The reason is that we need to do a lot of testing and make sure that we restore quickly,” he said. “That might involve rolling out a small disk library to each state that we back up to and then stream that back to Melbourne.”

The company has worked closely with backup vendor CommVault since 2007. “We were using a small business product to back up the data to tape on each single site so it was separate management,” he said. “One of the selection criteria for moving up to an enterprise level product was centralised control and reporting so we could control everything with one policy.”

He said this was a major time saver for the company and reduced cost of ownership. “This year what we have been doing with CommVault is extending the relationship to do virtual machine [VM] level backups and incremental restores out of those backups,” he said.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

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