Site Recovery Manager Reduces Disaster Recovery Time

The Director of IT of a major Stock Trading firm that operates in Princeton, NJ and in the New York Stock Exchange recently approached us with a challenge:

·         They have a proprietary software running on SQL database, a Microsoft Exchange 2003 cluster, and few file servers

·         They’re not confident that they can easily bring their business back up in the event of a major disaster in their Princeton location.

·         Their infrastructure consisted of 10 fairly dated Dell PowerEdge servers and 2 Dell Equallogic SANs.

·         With their current disaster recovery plan in place, their recovery time looked at about 40 hours and 1 days’ worth of data loss.

Our solution was to implement VMware vSphere 4.1 across 2 new Dell R710s and virtualize all 10 servers utilizing their existing SANs. We then setup 2 new Dell R710s in our datacenter with a Dell PS6000 SAN for offsite Disaster Recovery. They purchased the VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) that helps to automate the recovery process. With SRM you accelerate recovery and ensure successful recovery by automating the recovery process and eliminating the complexity of managing and testing recovery plans. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager eliminates complex manual recovery steps and removes the risk and worry from disaster recovery.

·         Decrease planned and unplanned downtime for improved business continuity.

·         Protect all of your important systems and applications with disaster recovery.

After implementation of the new infrastructure, we were able to non-intrusively test their disaster recovery plan. We’ve now brought their recovery time down from 40 hours to 4 hours with zero data loss.