Client story Enhancing Efficiency With Hybrid Disaster Recovery
By Insight Editor / 15 Aug 2019 / Topics: Hybrid cloud Backup & recovery
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Healthcare
Size of company:
Serves 120,000 medical professionals
Challenge:
The client needed to prevent the risk of losing critical data from potential natural disaster for both its primary data center and disaster recovery site, which were only 20 miles apart. .
Solution:
- Backup data relocation to hybrid cloud
- Disaster recovery as a service
- Project management
- NetApp Private Storage for Cloud
- FlexPod Converged Infrastructure
- A400 All-Flash Storage Array data repository
Results:
- Reduced data backup from 12 to 2 hours
- Cut disaster recovery time from 72 to 8 hours
- Improved computing power 5x
- Decreased physical footprint
Solution area:
Insight’s Cloud + Data Center Transformation solutions help clients improve data center availability, performance and efficiency.
Data-intense operations must employ a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy that ensures information is safe and easily available in the event of an emergency. Storing backups in secure, far-off locations from the primary data center is vital.
A nonprofit medical association that delivers news and resources to more than 125,000 members had both its DR site and data center located in close proximity — only 20 miles apart. That left the association’s core mission at risk if a natural disaster were to damage the two facilities.
To reduce potential harm, the nonprofit decided to relocate its DR platform at a safe distance from the data center. As a long-term goal, the organization wanted to use the new DR site to share growing production and development and to test workloads.
To reduce potential harm, the nonprofit decided to relocate its DR platform at a safe distance from the data center.
Adopting the best of on-premises and cloud
The association determined high-performance virtualization and cloud technologies were the key to solving its challenges. It chose Insight to lead the migration design, planning and deployment of the compute, storage and multicloud initiative.
The project, which needed to be completed within a week before the next data synchronization point, would involve migrating the DR system and the communications infrastructure, including:
- Storage and backup and recovery applications
- Network security systems
- Firewalls
- Cloud interconnections
Our Cloud + Data Center Transformation team went to work resolving the DR/headquarters proximity issues by relocating the client’s DR infrastructure into a cloud-friendly, vendor-neutral Equinix International Business Exchange data center in Silicon Valley.
We also implemented NetApp Private Storage for Cloud, FlexPod Converged Infrastructure and an A400 All-Flash Storage Array 75- to 90-terabyte data repository.
Moving to the Equinix data center aligned our client with an interconnection-first strategy. This created direct connections to the client’s high-performance, cost-effective system and storage cloud technologies, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure/Office 365.
This hybrid cloud approach eliminates some overhead and maintenance costs typically associated with redundant systems by putting compute resources in the cloud.
The technology adoption went smoothly, and the Insight team met the production-ready deadline.
Leveraging quick, dependable backups
The nonprofit now has a DRaaS solution that’s fast, reliable and fully managed by Insight. With private, secure and dedicated on-premises storage coupled with on-demand cloud compute power, it’s the best of both worlds.
Our work decreased the client’s recovery time for mission-critical applications from 72 hours to fewer than eight. We also reduced full snapshot capture and recovery from 12 hours to two, thanks to faster data processing.
The project increased storage optimization 2.5x and minimized data snapshot and clone creation more than 200x.
The project increased storage optimization 2.5x and minimized data snapshot and clone creation more than 200x by using the NetApp storage arrays with data compression/deduplication.
We also decreased the client’s physical footprint and overall management overhead by deploying and integrating high-performance compute, storage and multicloud DR infrastructure.
“We now have a significantly more resilient and robust disaster recovery infrastructure with five times more computing power, ultrafast storage and unparalleled interconnection to multiple clouds at a nominal, incremental cost,” says the association’s vice president and chief information officer.
“This will give our developers an ‘easy button’ to create their own virtual environments on the fly to do development and testing with multiple clouds without losing control of their data.”
