Storage Tier

Overview

Background- Indian Meteorology Department is an agency of the Ministry of Earth Sciences of the Government of India. The agency harvests the meteorological observations, weather forecasting and seismology reports and also responsible for communicating and forecasting weather services.

Challenges

They wanted a lightweight script that must integrate into their existing application environment which is Java Based Image Processing UI. The solution must cater multi-staging data protection(D2D2T). The backup storage should scale out low-cost NAS storage.

Solutions

• After analyzing and understanding their core problem, we initiated our process with the help of Alfresco Content Management solution.
• This management tool stores all the files and allows to search all the multiple folders for content.
• The next step is to map the different tiers of storage to separate folder and write automation script.
• This automation script checks the capacity of primary storage periodically and moves data to secondary storage based on some rules.
• We integrated the original data processing application with Alfresco API, to store and access the data.
• We rebuilt and revamped the existing applications to meet today’s agility and scalability demands in the market.
• This automation script checks the capacity of primary storage periodically and moves data to secondary storage based on some rules.

Mapping a Multi-Tier data staging solution with incredible ease.

“Stop looking at the problem like a problem” sounds great but the sentence proved correct when we implemented the same. Understanding the problem and getting to the roots of it fetched excellent results. IMD leveraged our strategic solutions to fast forward their current scenario into a better vision that became a reality by embracing our services. IMD wanted an answer to stage large volume of satellite data staging in multi-tiered storage as per customers configurable SLA (if the capacity > 70% move to next tier). Also, the respective application server should find the data automatically in case they get staged to a net tier. Not to mention that need a specific solution which is lightweight, simple and open. After digesting the requirements, what our technical connoisseurs did was something incredible. We used Alfresco Content Management solution to store all the files. The management solution puts the business flow in a fast track mode and integrates very intelligently. We mapped the different tiers of storage to a different folder and penned an automation script to check the capacity of primary storage to secondary periodically. Then we integrated the original data processing application with Alfresco API, to store and access data.

OUTCOME

The resulted solution helped IMD to save cost on primary storage by 50%. They also reduced 90% operations job of moving data in different storage tiers. We helped them stage huge data without changing any of their existing application. The entire infrastructure is maintained with the code that we created and tailored as per their business requests. The final product is a lightweight solution that is easy and open.