22 November 2005

Global automotive firm DaimlerChrysler develops products from small cars to sports cars and luxury sedans, and from versatile vans to heavy duty trucks or comfortable coaches. The firm's passenger car brands include Maybach, Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge and Smart, and its commercial vehicle brands include Mercedes-Benz, Freightliner, Sterling, Western Star, Setra and Mitsubishi Fuso.

The firm's Sindlefingen plant stretches over almost two square kilometres and is the organisation's largest automobile production plant. Approximately 41,000 employees are engaged in production and development work to produce 500,000 passenger cars annually, from the C-, E- und S-class series assembly lines. Furthermore, the entire development and design as well as the crash tests of the Daimler-models are conducted at the Mercedes-Benz technology centre, which was built in 2000 on the Sindlefingen site.

Due to the significance and sensitive nature of the data produced at Sindlefingen, the IT officer responsible for multimedia decided to replace the existing Windows XP solution with a comprehensive back-up strategy. The DaimlerChrysler IT project group exchanged ideas with employees from the Sindlefingen plant along with those from the plant at Untertrkheim. EMC Dantz Retrospect back-up and recovery software was recommended by the IT team at Untertrkheim, who use Retrospect to provide data protection in their graphic design department. Following an extensive test of Retrospect as well as a competing product from Veritas, Sindelfingen selected Retrospect for Windows.

The office service management and media service departments at Sindelfingen implemented a solution including the Multi Server edition of EMC Dantz Retrospect 7 for Windows, the add-on for disaster recovery as well as the MSL 6000 tape library from the Hewlett Packard Ultrium production series, which supports up to two Ultrium 460 drives and thirty cassette plug-ins per module. The environment runs on a separate DaimlerChrysler home network, and is comprised of a server, a Raid system, production line robot and twelve PCs.

The secured data contains photos, layouts, drafts, sketches, designs and modifications of the cars' body and interior as well as test data. Security is a fundamental requirement for DaimlerChrysler and a separate network was needed to store the extremely confidential plans for new car models and crash test data. An important aspect of security is confidentiality, which is provided by encryption technology. EMC Dantz Retrospect enables DaimlerChrysler to feel confident that their data is protected against unauthorised access.

Photos are developed exclusively by internal photographers in the company's laboratory and only released to those responsible for the particular car series. The volume of data which can be secured amounts to approximately 1,300 gigabytes today and is expected to grow in the future due to the rising number of photos. The data processing administrator responsible for the back-up set up a subsequent script for the network security: during the week, the daily automatic back-up of the servers takes place overnight.

Every two weeks a full back-up of the server is made, which takes approximately 24 hours, and the server is also secured once a month. Due to the high levels of security, data cannot be stored on the PCs and they are therefore not accounted for. In cycles of six weeks, the oldest back-up is overwritten by the current one. "Following the script input, together with the HP tape library robots, the data back-up practically runs by itself as the media does not have to be changed," explained the data processing administrator.

The tapes are stored in an internal department fireproof safe to protect them from disasters. The disaster recovery function was purchased in case of a possible server breakdown. However it is yet to be needed or used. The crucial database is secured repeatedly. A Raid system mirrors the data which is then highly available on the Raid disks. EMC Dantz Retrospect further secures the complete system on tapes in order to carry out a recovery should a Raid disk fail or be damaged and cannot be re-generated.

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