Benefit fund pairs its core infrastructure with hosted disaster recovery

The project

This large benefit fund needed a high-end disaster recovery and contingency solution to ensure business continuity. The work had two parts: upgrade the SAN infrastructure in the corporate office, and implement a similar architecture in a disaster recovery facility. The fund also wanted the remote site to earn its keep. Rather than standing idle waiting for a disaster, it should provide additional processing power whenever the corporate office was under significant load.

The challenges

• Short recovery objectives. The solution had to deliver a short Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective, so the organization could recover quickly and completely from a failure.
• Redundancy at the core. High levels of redundancy had to be built into the main infrastructure to reduce the risk of a contingency event happening at all.
• Consistent security and availability. The security and availability standards of the main infrastructure had to extend into the disaster recovery environment, not stop at the office walls.
• A DR site that works for a living. The remote site had to contribute useful capacity during normal operations instead of sitting as idle insurance.

The solution

Winmill designed a modern solution for the main office paired with a mirrored disaster recovery site hosted in Winmill’s data center. Replication runs across the two sites and covers both backups and live servers, so the environments stay in step during normal operations and the fund isn’t reconstructing state after a failure.

The results

• Failover with minimal data loss. If the primary site becomes disabled, the mirrored site takes over with minimal data loss and the fund keeps operating.
• Capacity, not idle insurance. The same replication that protects the fund makes everyday processing more efficient, with the hosted site adding processing power when the corporate office is under load.
• Continuity the fund can stand behind. Disaster recovery is critical for a benefit fund, because participants’ health and retirement benefits are at risk if the business can’t quickly resume operation. With people’s livelihoods at stake, this organization decided to do things the right way.