Africa’s largest aviation agency, South Africa’s National Airways Corporation (NAC), plans to deploy Hewlett-Packard technology to securely back up 20 terabytes of company data.

The Johannesburg-headquartered NAC is set to use HP Autonomy LiveVault to perform this task. HP Autonomy specialises in software that processes human information, or unstructured data, including social media, email, video, audio, text and web pages.
 
Meanwhile, the NAC provides a range of services for fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, including sales, maintenance, aircraft charter and pilot training.
 
And HP, in a statement, says its Autonomy LiveVault system is to be used in a large-scale deployment to secure approximately 100 servers across South Africa for NAC.

These servers are distributed across NAC’s seven airports and airfield sites, and data is expected to be backed up securely to local on-premises HP LiveVault Turbo-Restore Appliances and off-site to secure geographically separated data centres across South Africa, says HP.
 
“The ability to scale without much capital outlay was particularly important to us, because we need to protect such large quantities of data, which is being created in numerous different sites across the country,” said Andrew McGurk, IT manager, National Airways Corporation.
 
NAC was previously using disparate tape backup systems to protect company data, says HP.

HP says the transition then from a slow, complex and manual on-site backup system to the hybrid deployment from HP is planned to boost reliability and speed for both the backup and recovery processes..
 
“Legacy backup technology simply cannot offer reliable business continuity in the face of huge volumes of geographically dispersed data,” said Lorna Hardie, software country manager, HP South Africa.