Success Stories Benefit Fund Needs Hosted Data Center
The Project
This major benefit fund needed a high-end Disaster Recovery and Contingency Solution to ensure business continuity. They needed to upgrade their SAN infrastructure in their corporate office, and implement a similar architecture in a disaster recovery facility. They wanted to be able to use the remote site not only for disaster recovery, however, but also to provide additional processing power when the corporate office was experiencing significant load. They called Winmill.
Challenge
- How to ensure short Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) so the organization can recover quickly and successfully from a failure
How to ensure short Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) so the organization can recover quickly and successfully from a failure - How to build in high levels of redundancy into the main infrastructure to reduce the risk of a contingency event
- How to extend the high levels of security and availability on the main infrastructure into the Disaster Recovery/Contingency infrastructure
- How to make the solution easily manageable for the in-house system and network engineers
Solution
- Implement a VMWare virtualized solution
- Replicate key servers in the DR data center to meet the defined Recovery Point Objective (RPO)/ Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
- Implement EMC SAN and backup storage technology to ensure resiliency and performance
- Replicate the entire environment within one of WinMill’s secure data center infrastructures for off site disaster recovery/contingency
- Enable system adminstrators full access to both infrastructures so they most effectively utilize and manage both data center resources
- Run secondary servers full-time in the Disaster Recovery environment
The Results
Winmill designed an EMC/VMware solution for the main office with a mirrored Disaster Recovery site hosted at Winmill’s data center. This powerful solution provides replication across the two sites of backups and live servers. Not only does this provide for highly efficient everyday processing, but it provides fail over with minimal data loss in the event that the primary site becomes disabled.
Disaster recovery is of critical importance to a Benefit Fund; participants’ health and retirement benefits are at risk if the business cannot quickly resume operation after a disaster. When people’s livelihoods were at stake, this organization decided to do things the right way.
