Making a speedy recovery

Case Studies Wed 18th, Jan 2012 by Softcat Publisher 0
The Pensions Trust administers pension schemes for the employees of over 4,300 charitable, social, educational, voluntary and not-for-profit organisations.

Performance issues

The Pensions Trust is serious about disaster recovery. So serious, in fact, that its IT team simulates a real disaster each year by moving to an offsite location to ensure that it can recover its business-critical financial and administration data. To do this, the Trust rented physical space from an ISP where it could relocate and re-use older hardware from its primary site to enable disaster recovery. However, as the Trust invested more in upgrading the hardware at its primary site, the performance of the hardware at its disaster recovery site became unacceptable.

The Trust looked for a better solution. Many providers wanted to charge a premium for an all-in-one service, including rental of storage, but the Trust only wanted to pay for what it needed, and wanted to continue using the equipment it had invested in over the years. Few suppliers offered what it was looking for.

A flexible solution

Softcat proposed a flexible solution for hosting the entire disaster recovery infrastructure in a way that would meet the Pensions Trust’s needs. The two organisations already had a long-term working relationship, and the plan went ahead.

"Softcat’s account management is fantastic. We’ve had really good experiences with them in the past, so trusting them with disaster recovery was an easy decision to make."
Darren Bull Business Support Manager, the Pensions Trust

Now the Pensions Trust has its own backup device located in Softcat’s data centre. Although the client must pay to house its equipment, it no longer has to pay additional costs for rental of storage. Softcat keeps the equipment powered on, and proactively manages the environment from its state-of-the-art network operations centre. In the event of a disaster, Softcat will recover the data onto its own environment, in which it has invested heavily.

Enabling quick recovery

In the last test, Softcat’s environment performed just as well as the Trust’s primary site, much to the satisfaction of the Pension Trust’s users. Everyone involved felt the initial test represented a major improvement, according to the Trust’s business support manager Darren Bull.

"Last year our users said the disaster recovery was quite unusable; this year they’ve found it to be just as good as the primary network. It has been a worthwhile move."
Darren Bull Business Support Manager, the Pensions Trust

Now, for the first time, not only can the Trust recover quickly in a disaster scenario, but it also has a system that is completely usable. Rather than having to rely on old equipment for months at a time, it has a new, effective solution already in place.

Project profile

  • Flexible, remote disaster recovery
  • Offsite backup solution
  • Proactive management via Softcat’s network operations centre
  • Virtual desktops

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