Imagine THE POSSIBILITIES
Imagine THE POSSIBILITIES
From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 6, Issue 3 - April 2006
When looking for a data protection solution,
Specialist global reinsurance writer, The Imagine Group, had five key
requirements that the successful solution had to meet. The Topio Data Protection
Suite (TDPS) proved equal to that challenge.
Each day, specialist reinsurance writer, the Imagine Group, processes business
data from all of its offices around the globe. The majority of these locations
are customer focused and few have technical staff in place to manage complex
data storage, networking or recovery procedures.
Also, the company uses a disparate mix of information technology (IT) systems
and applications - Dell servers running databases and Microsoft applications
such as MS Exchange - and a variety of internal and external storage devices.
As the sites were handling data critical to Imagine's business operations,
the company had to ensure the information was protected 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week.
When looking for a data protection solution, Imagine had five key
requirements. The solution had to:
• Provide a solid data protection strategy for its global operations
• Minimise the need for significant new investment in IT equipment and
personnel, and keep the total cost of ownership (TCO) low
• Ensure that, should any site fail, the data is restored swiftly so business
can continue without interruption
• Comply with FSA regulations which require remotely backed-up data to be easily
accessible should any compliance queries arise
• And keep Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) as
close to zero as possible. RPO refers to the amount of data that could be lost
during the recovery process, and RTO is the time it takes to get a location up
and running after a disaster.
For a global company with heterogeneous systems at each location, this was quite
a challenge. Imagine chose Topio Data Protection Suite (TDPS) as its worldwide
data protection standard because TDPS met all of its requirements. Topio's
innovative, heterogeneous disaster recovery and data protection solutions enable
Imagine to self-define and efficiently implement its data protection and
replication strategies, without significant additional investment in hardware or
other tools. TDPS will also dramatically reduce Imagine's network bandwidth and
storage costs. Taurus, a premier Topio business partner, handles all aspects of
TDPS implementations around the world, ensuring an efficient installation
process.
Fast disaster recovery
Imagine's TDPS solution is replicating data from business-critical servers at
five of the company's production sites (Barbados, Bermuda, Dublin, London and
New York) to a standalone secondary site outside Dublin, which is built around a
storage area network (SAN) based on IBM FastT products. Topio clients are
installed on all of Imagine's production servers, which replicate data over the
company's IP networks to a Topio server at the secondary site. If necessary,
technicians can access target volumes for testing or, in case of disaster, the
volumes can be accessed via virtual standby servers.
Fast disaster recovery
This enables Imagine to test or implement disaster recovery procedures without
requiring onsite staff at the primary or secondary sites. Once the secondary
site was set up, technicians ran capacity planning for each Imagine location in
order to optimise the company's data protection and network utilisation. All
servers were then synchronised to optimise performance, some over the network,
some using off-line synchronisation. The servers are now in continuous
replication to the secondary site, with periodic testing carried out to verify
data consistency.
Now Imagine's data is securely replicated, stored, and managed - and can be
quickly recovered - from a single location, without extensive changes to the
company's networking or storage infrastructures. Moreover, Imagine saved money
on equipment costs and salaries, because it did not have to hire technicians to
manage its data protection processes at each site around the globe.
"We're delighted with the solution that Topio and Taurus have implemented for
us," says Imagine's IT director Paul De Munnik. "We now know that all our data
around the world is safe, no matter what happens-and, importantly, that we can
be back up and running again shortly, should disaster strike. They were also
able to develop a very attractive proposition for us, in terms of total cost of
ownership - we did not have to change our existing IT infrastructure or make
significant investments in IT personnel at our many different sites."
As Imagine continues to grow, so will its data protection needs. But the
company is confident that Topio will expand along with its business ambitions,
with minimal investment in IT hardware and systems, and with clear control of
operations and cost from a single site. Imagine is a company on the move and,
with the benefits provided by the Topio solution, can be assured that, wherever
its business interests travel, they are not at risk. ST
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