Pittwater Council embraces real-time backups

Pittwater Council, which is the local authority for the coastal area of Pittwater, maintains a large number of records, ranging from council notifications to planning approvals.

Previously, data was backed up onto magnetic tapes, which had to be physically – and frequently – transported to the remote site for storage.

Now, the Council has deployed Juniper Networks EX 4200 series switches in its main office and at a remote disaster recovery site located 2km away.

This allows for real-time data backup to off-site network attached storage.

Pittwater will continue to use tape in addition to the offsite disaster recovery solution, the Council said.

In both locations, the EX 4200 series switches operate as a single switch by running the Virtual Chassis technology across dual 10 Gbps Ethernet fibre links. The EX 4200 series also supports VMware VMotion, the virtual systems application that the council uses to mirror virtual machines to the remote site for added resilience.

The EX 4200 series switches use Juniper’s Virtual Chassis technology, which is said to enable up to 10 of the 1RU switches to be interconnected over a high-speed 128 Gbps backplane and operate as a single, logical system.

Juniper Networks said that extending the Virtual Chassis technology across the 10 Gbps Ethernet fibre links 'dramatically simplified' the Council’s network management by allowing IT staff to administer the multiple switches as a single logical device.

The EX-series switches also eliminated wasted bandwidth on idle optical fibre links, the vendor claimed.

“The Virtual Chassis feature was a major enabler,” said Chris Tubridy, IT manager, Pittwater Council. “By allowing our optical links to be used concurrently, the Juniper approach simplifies administration while it also provides higher throughput and reliability.

“Redundancy is built into the architecture, and none of our optical links need be idle. The EX-series brings a resilient solution that optimises use of our existing resources, with simplified management and excellent economics.”

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