DIFE Institute of Human Nutrition

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Human Nutrition on the safe side

”We needed a reliable backup solution supporting our heterogeneous IT landscape, in particular our Novell environment.”

The mission of the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIFE) is to conduct experimental and clinical research in the field of nutrition and health. The goal is to understand the source of nutrition-dependent diseases on a molecular basis and to develop new strategies for prevention, treatment and dietary guidelines. DIFE conducts research in many areas, for example in pharmacology, clinical nutrition, fat cell development and much more. “SEP sesam is one of the few products suitable for our entire server environment which contains Novell Groupware and Novell file servers.” states Wolfgang Lux, IT director of DIFE.

The spirit of research needs SEP sesam

“As part of our research complex studies are often performed. The inquiry of the research data is often expensive and time consuming“, knows Wolfgang Lux. A reliable backup is consequently essential for the Nutrition Institute. “Various incidents could endanger the availability of data on our servers, for example if a storage media fails due to a blackout of the power supply. Protection against cybercrime, computer viruses, theft and trojan horses also plays an important role for us. User failures of the institutes’staff like an accidentally deleted file or the saving of a wrong version can also not be excluded.

The Challenge

The Institute needed a reliable solution for high speed data backup and recovery with automatic migration capability to perform regular backups in a small time frame. The DIFE only has a small window of time to perform regular backups and sought a solution that could perform under these constraints.

“We produce a huge amount of data and therefore we needed an extremely reliable backup solution for our valuable research data,” explains Wolfgang Lux.

The Solution

After SEP sesam prevailed against the competition and was recommended by araneaNET, an external service provider for DIFE’s Novell infrastructure with GroupWise, Filr, Vibe, ZENworks and NetIQ Identity Manager, they began with the selection and planning of the software and hardware installation. The entire installation and configuration process was managed by araneaNET and the Institute’s IT team was actively involved in all phases.

“SEP sesam meets all requirements. All backup and recovery jobs are performed successfully. Since the implementation of SEP sesam, there hasn’t been a single failure of a backup job. We are very satisfied”, sais DIFE IT-Director Wolfgang Lux.

Made For Emergencies

The German Institute of Human Nutrition relies on SEP sesam for all data recovery jobs. In the past, data had been accidentally deleted from time to time. Since the implementation of SEP sesam, this is no longer a concern. All data habe been successfully recovered. “The biggest nightmare for me would be a lightning strike or a damage by fire or water in the server room. That could destroy many or all critical server data. If the backups respectively the recovering would fail in this situation, we would have a real disaster. In this case years of research would be lost forever,” explains Wolfgang Lux. “Due to our backup strategy and the outstanding implementation with including an outsourcing of the backup tapes to a different location eliminates the risk of data loss.” In the future the German Institute of Human Nutrition plans a long-term archiving of raw research data with SEP sesam.

Customer Environment:

• Physical servers
• Micro Focus eDirectory
• Micro Focus Identity Manager
• Micro FocusGroupWise & Micro Focus Vibe as E-Mail/collaboration platform for 450 User
• Windows servers
• Linux File-Server-Cluster
• Accounting / finance and settlement systems
• Outsourced tape backups

SEP sesam Modules:

• Mail/Groupware: Micro Focus GroupWise
• Backup Server: Linux
• Client operating systems: Linux, Windows
• 50 Slot Autoloader Support
• Backup to DISK
• Bare System Recovery for Windows servers