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Towards the end of 2013, Milton Keynes Council approached The Open University to assist with a tender for the three-year MK:Smart research initiative, which aims to support economic growth in Milton Keynes.

"Milton Keynes is one of the UK's fastest growing cities," explains Paul Alexander, Technical Operations Lead for the MK:Smart project. "Our challenge is in minimising strain on the infrastructure as the city grows."

The initiative kicked off in January 2014, led by The Open University. The MK Data Hub is a sophisticated data management platform that can process vast amounts of data relevant to city systems. It was primarily designed by The Open University and BT and is being hosted in the heart of the city, by the University of Bedfordshire, at University Campus Milton Keynes (UCMK).

The Data Hub provides an infrastructure for acquiring, managing and sharing multiple terabytes of data sourced from city systems. It will hold data about energy and water consumption, transport, weather and pollution sourced from satellite technology, sensor networks, social and economic datasets, social media and specialised apps. The MK Data Hub will process the data then make it available to developers and SMEs. They will be able to search a catalogue of available data feeds to 'feed' applications, start up a virtual machine to develop applications, and buy/sell applications or data feeds via the service management platform.

AVAILABILITY IS KEY
One of MK:Smart's aims is to encourage third parties to build applications that make use of the data within the MK Data Hub, and citizens to adopt those applications to optimise their use of the city's resources.

"We need to ensure the data is constantly available for any project using the information feeds in their own application and for the people running those applications," explains Alexander. "Our team needs historical data to be available so we can analyse trends."

Securing the data the initiative relies on is challenging. The various elements of the project acquire their data from diverse sources and store it across numerous data stores, including MySQL, Progress and Microsoft SQL Server. Furthermore, the data stores are made accessible through a storage area network (SAN).

With the initiative continually evolving and uncovering new sources to draw data from, MK:Smart needed a heterogeneous and scalable recovery management solution. "We needed a solution that could both back up and recover data over a SAN," notes Alexander.

BACKUP IN A HETEROGENEOUS ENVIRONMENT
After extensive research into all available backup and recovery solutions, Alexander and his team decided to implement Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) in partnership with NCE Computer Group and CMS Distribution. "Arcserve UDP was the only solution able to recover data over a SAN," reveals Alexander. "It also offered the support for a heterogeneous environment we needed."

CMS worked with NCE to ensure that the team had the licences it needed both for the initial proof of concept and subsequent deployment, which helped keep the project on track as it gained momentum.

A successful proof of concept demonstrated compression rates of 40 per cent and deduplication rates of 30 per cent. "We expect deduplication rates to increase further as we take more data on board," acknowledges Alexander. "Rates this high mean we can retain backups for longer and access data and logs for longer - which is crucial with a research initiative where you need to analyse all issues that transpire."

MK:Smart's technical operations team implemented the core Arcserve UDP in less than three days then fine-tuned it to optimise backup and recovery capabilities across its diverse data stores. The solution safeguards data across 12 virtual servers and six physical servers, protecting not only data sourced from the city's systems, but also Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and Active Directory accounts, data produced by applications, file stores and web servers. "We will rely on cloud solutions to provide any additional resources required at peak demand," notes Alexander.

Every Friday Arcserve UDP automatically backs up the entire MK Data Hub in less than 30 minutes. Incremental backups are run on weekdays at multiple intervals throughout the day and last no more than 10 minutes. Backups are replicated to a disaster recovery site elsewhere in Milton Keynes.

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