Through the issuance of patents, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) encourages technological advancement by providing incentives to invent, invest in, and disclose new technology worldwide. Through the registration of trademarks, the agency assists businesses in protecting their investments, promoting goods and services, and safeguarding consumers against confusion and deception in the marketplace. By disseminating both patent and trademark information, the USPTO promotes an understanding of intellectual property protection and facilitates the development and sharing of new technologies worldwide.

The job of protecting this information from any data loss as it is processed is the responsibility of the USPTO Enterprise Tape Backup System (ETBS). The current system consists of seven backup domains, 165 tape drives in 21 tape libraries, and over 50 backup servers. The ETBS backs up 200+ Terabytes (TB) of data in 1.2 billion files per month. While this system has tremendous capacity, much of the hardware is old and underutilized. In addition, no tools exist to provide status reports or monitor the health of the system.

PPC was given the challenge to redesign the ETBS with the goal of consolidating equipment, increasing utilization, reducing software license fees, and hardware maintenance costs. All the work needed to be completed without any interruption in service of the existing system. PPC system engineers began the redesign effort by assessing industry and government best practices and evaluating the latest hardware and software technology solutions.

PPC's new SAN-based ETBS system processes backups much faster, reduces overall costs, and is more reliable than the previous system. By reducing the number of tape libraries from 21 to 4 and the number of tape drives from 165 to 80, software licensing and hardware maintenance costs were reduced by 30%.

The use of a Storage Resource Management tool provides system administrators and managers with real time reporting on the status of any backup job. System reliability is increased because there is much less hardware to maintain and the enterprise class libraries incorporate many high-availability features.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Ivette Grainer-Smith
Project Performance Corporation
703-748-7045
igsmith@ppc.com