CASE 2

Client: A large consumer retailer headquartered in Northern NJ with multiple storefronts and a strong web presence for consumer ordering and informational needs. Our client cannot be down at all, as the impact on revenues from website and POS registers in the stores is significant. Our client has a highly redundant and sophisticated primary data center.

Challenge: Our client had issues with unplanned downtime due to hardware failures, maintenance,etc. These issues were few, but as the client grew and expanded, downtime in any scenario was deemed unacceptable.

Solution: Essextec designed a highly redundant server/storage/switch environment that would be housed in a secondary hosting site. Several data replication solutions were investigated including both host and SAN based options. Our client chose to house the failover infrastructure in a co-location hosting center, thus avoiding the cost to build out a secondary data center of their own.

Essextec also provided several secondary sites for evaluation, including one in the Midwest, to mitigate the possibility that a regional catastrophe could compromise both primary and secondary sites in the same area.

Client is using real time replication to copy ongoing transactions to the secondary site. Client users are now able to seamlessly roll over to the backup infrastructure in the case of a true disaster, or as an added benefit, for scheduled application or hardware maintenance. Our client has true 24 hour availability, in addition to a fully functional Business Continuity plan.

In a future phase, Essextec will assist in adding a third site for SAN only replication to ensure that another copy of the critical data can be accessed in the event of unanticipated multiple failures in the primary and secondary environments.

Essex Technology Group, Inc. - 1.888.519.1518 - www.essextec.com - contactus@essextec.com