Business Continuity
Does Your Company Suffer From:
Disaster
Unavailability
Downtime
Compromised Infrastructure
essextec Expertise
Business Continuity and Recovery Services is a collection of strategies, tools and services that address the wide range of recovery techniques that a client may choose from to minimize or eliminate down time caused by a compromised IT hardware infrastructure. The amount of down time tolerance, risk avoidance and available budget are some of the major issues that influence the level of protection selected.
The options available to address these considerations can be as simple as a prearranged contract to ship replacement equipment to the customer’s data center or alternative site within 72 hours of disaster declaration. It can also be a hot site where hardware infrastructure matching the client’s requirements sits on standby in an IBM data center ready to be deployed. High availability provides 24/7 operations by replicating the production environment, either on a dedicated partition residing on the same server, or a more redundant option, where the production environment is mirrored to a separate server.
Disaster Recovery is a natural progression of high availability and is attained when the replication of the mission critical applications/data is done to a separate hardware infrastructure. This mirrored solution can be the same size as the production environment, or a scaled down version sized to handle a limited number of end users. It can also be dedicated or shared. Additionally, the mirrored, or replicated environment can be housed in the same customer data center, as the production infrastructure, or a higher level of disaster recovery can be achieved by placing it in another physical location. This second location can be owned and managed by the client, or placed in a facility owned and managed by a vendor such as IBM. This second scenario offers a number of benefits including geographical dispersement from the client’s data center in order to neutralize the effects of a local or regionalized disaster.
essextec can help clients sort through the complexity of choices to select the level of business continuity best suited for their requirements. We can then design and work with your team to implement a recommended solution.
Case Study
Client: The client is a global leader in providing innovative merchandising systems for the retail and apparel industries.
Challenge / Problem / Requirements: The client is an IBM outsourced customer in the IBM data center in Rochester, NY. In disaster situations, the client could be down for days and potentially weeks. Also, as part of the evolution in becoming a truly redundant IT company, they wanted to explore a disaster recovery solution which was not something they had in place. The client required a comparable IBM System p and storage infrastructure to be readily available within 24 hours in a recovery center
Test / Benchmark: essextec and IBM proposed an IBM Disaster Recovery Hot Site solution.
Solution / Implementation: essextec configured IBM Systems p590 and p570 with 5.5TB of customer data to be accessible to the client on the floor of the IBM Sterling Forest Recovery Center. The solution also called for IBM provisioning the necessary communication lines to access their hosted network.
Benefits: In the event of a disaster that destroys the client’s infrastructure, the client now has the ability to bring comparable System p and storage systems online for recovery in a 24 hour period.
The Solution
IBM and essextec solutions can help you ensure system availability and avoid loss of business, reputation and competitive advantage resulting from deliberate, accidental, or unexpected damage to vital IT infrastructure and data. These solutions enable you to anticipate and adjust to circumstances that place your infrastructure at risk, thereby decreasing the possibility of potentially catastrophic disruptions.
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