CASE STUDIES PLUS DANE GROUP VIRTUAL DISASTER RECOVERY
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Plus Dane Group chooses Nviron to virtualise and enable effective Disaster Recovery
Introduction
Plus Dane Group has over 15,000 homes in ownership and management across Merseyside and Cheshire. They are one of Britain’s Top 100 companies to work for employing over 400 people, have an asset value in excess of £500m, a combined development fund in excess of £210m and a turnover of over £50m.
In an effort to improve IT efficiency and develop a platform to enable high availability and disaster recovery (DR), Plus Dane invited Nviron to assess their needs and design a solution. In terms of DR they required an availability of at least 99.95% over 365 days of the year.
Challenge
Plus Dane Group was running physical servers with no fail over capabilities. Their two main offices were based in Cheshire and Merseyside and connected via a fibre link.
The challenge was therefore to design a solution that would enable each site to benefit from high availability, but to also utilise the separate locations to provide a DR capability that would enable systems based at one site to be invoked at the other.
Solution
The first stage of the solution was to virtualise the physical servers at each site. This involved a capacity plan exercise which concluded that all the Group’s physical servers could be moved across onto just four nodes, in a virtual environment. These servers were connected to a Dell EqualLogic SAN to provide high availability. In the event of a physical server failure, the virtual servers affected would migrate across automatically to one of the remaining server nodes.
Both sites now had 4 nodes connected to a Dell EqualLogic SAN. The next stage was to replicate the data between both sites. This was achieved using EqualLogic’s built in data replication which runs in real time across the fibre link.
By implementing VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) the Group now has an automated facility that is capable of invoking the servers at either site in the event of one of the main sites being lost. Therefore if the Merseyside site went off line, the Cheshire site is capable of running all their servers to enable users to continue to work. Users can access their applications from anywhere via a Citrix Access Gateway, which publishes their desktop to any device, across any network, securely.
Both of the main sites also host a Microsoft Exchange system and Nviron made the Group aware of a new feature in Exchange 2010 called Database Availability Group (DAG). This enables Exchange data to replicate between both sites to enable the service to continue in the event of one of the Exchange systems failing, independently of having to invoke SRM.
Result
Plus Dane Group has now achieved high availability and disaster recovery by using software tools from VMware and EqualLogic SANs. By reducing the number of physical servers they have cut running and support costs. The EqualLogic SANS have proved to be very reliable and additional SANs can be added to in the future as data storage requirements grow.
Benefits Summary
- Reduced management overheads
- Reduced power usage
- High availability in the event of a server failure
- Disaster recovery in the event of the loss of one of the main sites
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