Pharmaceutical business tasks Pro Drive to provide robust Disaster Recovery.
Pro Drive’s client, a developer and distributor of pharmaceutical products employing about fifty staff, required a robust IT disaster recovery system to replace their own disaster recovery facility which had become outdated and costly.
THE CHALLENGE
Pro Drive’s client requires a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. As a result they had invested in a separate disaster recovery site with backup servers and PCs which had served the business well for a number of years. This was costly to run – In addition to the costs of the lease, there was a need to operate, power and support a second set of servers. There was also a maintenance overhead from the use of Microsoft replication technologies to copy data, which often failed and had been complex to fix.
With the lease on the second site due for renewal and the technology becoming outdated there was a requirement for a more intelligent approach to IT disaster recovery that could deliver better protection to the business whilst reducing the significant operating costs of the old site.
THE APPROACH
Pro Drive proposed their Cloud Continuity Service powered by Datto Alto technology to replace the existing server estate at the disaster recovery site, allowing their client to release the site as it was no longer required.
The service provided an on premise appliance which took snapshots of all operations servers and sent copies to a cloud based data centre in the UK. As well as verifying the snapshots by starting the servers in the data centre once a day, Pro Drive carry out a full disaster recovery test of the system twice a year.
Should a physical server fail on site, Pro Drive could recover all virtual servers running on that device to their second physical server directly from the Datto appliance. In the unlikely event of a major disaster, Pro Drive would recover their client’s servers so they may be accessed in the Cloud from wherever they choose to do so.
THE RESULT
As a result of switching to the state of the art Datto technology, Pro Drive’s client benefited from a much improved recovery time – reduced by a factor of 75% compared to the expensive disaster recovery site.
Recovery testing is more frequent too – With the added ability to recover all servers in an isolated environment in the cloud, it can be done in business hours and without disrupting normal IT operations. Finally there is a very significant cost saving versus the old DR site – With savings on the rent of an office in addition to the £2,500 per annum spend on power, cooling, server management, hardware and software.
