OREANDA-NEWS. February 16, 2009. I.T. Co. completed modernization of the electronic archive at Magnitogorsk Smelter. Thanks to this project the archive access speed and its reliability increased.

Open Joint Stock Company Magnitogorsk Smelter (MMK) is the biggest company in the Russian iron industry. The strategic objective of MMK is preservation of long-term competitive ability and sustainable development. One of the priority objectives – creation of unified information environment, development and integration of information technologies.

In 2006 I.T. Co. commissioned electronic documents archives at the smelter based on IBM Content Manager that was integrated with the ERP system operating at the plant, built on the Oracle e-Business Suite platform. Initially the archive received a small number of documents of few types, however eventually their number and diversity grew significantly.

In April of 2008 the MMK archive has already stored over 1 million documents. After the archive was integrated in a number of business-processes and the number of documents grew sharply, the need arose for increased reliability, speed and information safety. All these factors brought the company to the decision to modernize the electronic archive.

MMK began working with I.T. Co. back in 2000 and contracted it again for the electronic archive modernization. Previously I.T. Co. has implemented the BOSS-Referent electronic documents management system at the plant.

In order to optimize the archive documents storage process the I.T. Co. specialists proposed a modification of the current archive system usage procedure based on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. This allows for archive data storage on cheap media (e.g. tape) and efficient management of growing information volumes. Now all MMK documents are changing their status, passing from the current to archive circulation, and then to the archive documents storage. In this process documents automatically migrate from the corporate IS to the DB2 Content Manager database and further on – pursuant to the regulations on storage for the given type of document – to the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager archive storage system. The I.T. Co. specialists have also transferred data from the old library and resource servers to the new ones as part of the project.

For I.T. Co. this was the first project involving data migration from Content Manager to Tivoli Storage Manager. In addition to storage of rarely used documents, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager was configured as a backup storage system for the entire Content Manager in general (data from all servers with all components, all configuration settings, databases contents, etc.). All the information from the Content Manager is backed-up to a remote location, and several versions of the data are stored, including the ones deleted from the Content Manager. Such application of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager allows for total restoration of Content Manager, including several versions of all current and archive MMK documents even when all the servers break down simultaneously.