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double-take rises to the occasion

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 4 - June 2007

Every business wants to reduce the risk to the business from server failure. Two leading companies found the right solution for them in Double-Take

For many years, Northcliffe - one of the largest and most successful regional newspaper publishers in the UK, producing more than nine million newspapers in an average week - has been successfully using PC server technology for the production of publications. Resilience and uptime had been managed by using a combination of RAID technology and redundant servers that could be brought on line relatively quickly.

For two key reasons, its existing strategy was not going to be good enough to meet the future requirements, as Martin, Northcliffe Group IT director, explains.
"We had reached a position that, if a server failed at the wrong time of day, we would not have time to bring it back on line, so we needed to consider real-time redundancy cost of the critical nature of producing newspapers. We needed a sophisticated, resilient system that was simple to support."

Basic Business Systems has supplied computer products and services to the Northcliffe Newspapers Group for more than 12 years. Working with Basic, a number of motions were identified. These systems were evaluated with Northcliffe's strategy in mind: resilience, but with a low cost of ownership. Following a six-month project, a clear winner became apparent - Double-Take, from NSI Software.

Double-Take was chosen primarily because of its simplicity when failing over to backup servers and its flexibility of configuration. Double-Take sat neatly in the background of the Windows server and did not affect the production server's efficiency or flood the network with traffic when replicating data.

Double-Take is used to replicate Exchange, SQL and file data; it operates in a transactional mode, with write order preservation ensuring data integrity. The product was also tested with Northcliffe's key editorial and advertising systems and found to work perfectly, with some minor modifications. The target servers do not need to match the exact configuration of any of the source servers it is backing up, just as long as it has sufficient processing power and disk storage.

Double-Take provides continuous, real-time data replication - allowing complete redundancy of data - therefore, continuous access to data and applications. Double-Take, Microsoft's preferred data replication engine, replicates vital data in real-time to a backup or failover server on an attached disk or on a server located anywhere in the world - ensuring full company operation within seconds to minutes of an outage.

Having met the criteria, Roy Martin makes this assessment. "A simple and effective solution, which provides protection to Northcliffe's critical data and significantly reduces the risk to the business from server failure. Working in partnership with Basic Business Systems has helped us achieve our goal and realise the potential of Double-Take."

Northcliffe has now successfully protected 50% of its sites, and, by the end of October 2003, plans to have all sites upgraded with the Double-Take standard.

ALLIED BAKERIES
The challenge facing Allied Bakeries - manufacturers of such leading brands as Kingsmill, Allinson, Sunblest and Burgen, with approximately a third share of the UK bread market - was no less challenging. Being in the fast consumer goods business means all orders are handled and despatched daily through an electronic processing system, which must remain up and running 24 hours a day.

"If the order processing procedure were to fail," says Dave Rowland, head of infrastructure at Allied Bakeries, "it would result in immediate loss of trade and reputation, not only for the group and individual bakeries, but also for the hundreds of retail outlets that we supply. This, coupled with the short lifecycle of our products, means any downtime in the system - notably server failure and the ensuing loss of data - is simply not a viable option."

In order to mitigate the risk of a breakdown in the order processing system, it was decided to seek a robust backup data replication process to ensure that a viable contingency operation could spring into action, in the event of a system failure. It was agreed that one of the key requirements should be the installation of a high-resilience, low-cost data replication business continuity solution that could be used to back up the functioning of significant servers.

Server failover and data replication is a vital component of any disaster recovery procedure and employs backup servers to swing into action in the event of unplanned downtime, without the loss of any vital information. Companies that perform 24x7 operations are particularly vulnerable to server failure and the impact this can have on the functioning of their business. If failure does occur, organisations need to have a reliable solution in place that ensures continuous access to data and applications on secondary backup servers, which will enable them to resume normal operations within seconds to minutes of an outage, without any risk to their performance and reputation.

RIGHT SOLUTION KNEADED
The IT shared service centre, and each bakery within the company, has a number of servers and backup servers installed for order process control and other day-to-day and critical applications. This means Allied Bakeries has a network of around 200 servers that all need to be running almost continuously. Allied Bakeries felt that it lacked a coherent IT failover strategy for cases when servers failed and therefore went about finding a remedy for this. It needed a technical solution that would enable it to develop a bespoke server and data backup system covering all 13 bakeries throughout the UK, as well as the IT shared services centre based in Liverpool.

After looking at a number of options, Rowland settled on a straightforward, simple and consistent business continuity solution, which would be cost-effective for the business, namely Double-Take, supplied exclusively to the European market by Sunbelt Software. The product is one of Microsoft's preferred data replication engines, due to its ability to replicate vital data in real-time to a backup or failover server located anywhere in the world.

"After evaluating a number of data replication products," states Rowland, "we found Double-Take to be a straightforward product, which is application independent, easy to manage and can be applied to all our Windows platforms. Double-Take just seemed to work out-of-the-box. It did what it said it would do, so we chose it."

A key factor to the success of the project was that not only did Sunbelt Software provide in-depth, specialist knowledge and support for Double-Take, but it was also able to adapt and apply its knowledge to deliver the right solution for Allied Bakeries.

According to Ian Masters, UK sales director at Sunbelt Software: "It was clear from the outset that Allied Bakeries required a bespoke solution, so we spent time training the relevant staff on the technology behind these systems (SQL and Biztalk) and empowered them with the necessary knowledge to design their own solution around Double-Take. This framework gave the relevant people the right skills to apply the technology and consequently build solutions which meet their very specific requirements. It was about applying our knowledge to product functionality to give the client what they wanted."

Allied Bakeries' Dave Rowland continues: "Sunbelt provided excellent evaluation, testing and deployment of Double-Take, as well as being very supportive throughout product training.

"The way we are driving the solution at the moment is that each secondary server monitors its primary server and if it sees a problem, it will raise the alarm with the network centre.The operator will then decide whether the primary server is going to fix itself and make a decision to failover or not. This helps the overall management of all servers and acts as an insurance policy. There is a lot of confidence in the system from the technical team who support the application. We also benefit from constant access to Sunbelt resources, as well as a competitive rate for the provision of licences and ongoing support." ST