projects & agreements
Sky improves
storage
efficiencies
with Veritas
Technologies
Since partnering with Veritas
Technologies Sky has
increased efficiency and
freed staff time to focus on
strategic IT transformation
projects using NetBackup,
NetBackup Appliances and
Information Map.
To help other customers
achieve similar success, Veritas
has announced today that it
is offering a free trial of the
Information Map for qualifying
NetBackup customers.
Sky is one of Europe’s
leading entertainment
companies that relies heavily
on technology to provide the
broadest range of content
to its 22 million users. To
improve service delivery,
Sky prioritised visibility into
its company data and being
able to back up and quickly
recover business critical
information. However, the
reliance on some legacy
tape based back up systems
resulted in IT scaling issues
and staff inefficiencies.
Through the NetBackup
Converged Platform, Sky is
able to protect its information,
and at the same time, identify
opportunities throughout
its environment to optimise
information storage and reduce
risk in as little as 24 hours.
42
BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL USES DATAPIPE
TO BUILD THE FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has used Datapipe to help
initiate a radical change within its organisation.
BMJ started out over 170 years ago as a medical journal. Now
as a global brand, BMJ has expanded to encompass 60 specialist
medical and allied science journals with millions of readers.
BMJ has moved its digital platform to a fully automated
shared-nothing architecture with virtualised infrastructure.
In doing so, it has brought a new culture of sustainable
development and continuous integration to the organisation.
BMJ’s story is a familiar one: Its infrastructure had grown
organically over time as new sites, applications and features
were commissioned. However, as it grew it increasingly built a
technical debt.
BMJ had become a 24/7 organisation in recent years and its product portfolio had become
international in profile, so the capacity and availability for allowing downtime – scheduled
or otherwise – was diminishing. It needed to change its culture and move to a sustainable
development cycle of continuous integration and automation. However, it was also used to being
in control and keeping everything in-house, so it needed a managed service provider (MSP) who
could work in true partnership.
Atheon Analytics and Exasol build a
backpack sized server cluster for analytics
Exasol and Atheon Analytics have released a fast commodity hardware based four server analytics
database cluster that can be dismantled and transported in a backpack. The simple setup uses offthe-shelf mini PCs and has a bespoke network switch rack made out of Lego.
Atheon Analytics has developed the innovative solution primarily to run its in-house
development cluster. Atheon found that by using equipment that costs less than two months’
cloud hosting, it could create a full production-comparable cluster that is capable of running all
its development needs and sits on a table in the
corner of the office.
Atheon Analytics found the enterprise levels
of support offered by cloud providers were
unnecessary for a development workload. It
also found that having kit on-premise brings the
cluster to life and allows users to test how the
environment copes with exceptions. To simulate
a disk failure, it can simply unplug the disk. To
simulate a server failure, it can simply turn off
a machine in the cluster. The team is then able
to watch how the cluster behaves and ensure it
recovers exactly as expected.