100% guaranteed, disaster recovery (DR) service employed at CAFOD’s new office replaces charity’s twin site data backup operation
CAFOD is the official Catholic aid agency for England and Wales. In more than 40 countries across the world, the agency brings hope, compassion and solidarity to poor communities, standing side by side with them to end poverty and injustice.
CAFOD raises funds from the Catholic community in England and Wales, the UK government and the general public. These resources fund development programmes, which help to lift people out of poverty and improve living standards. In emergencies, the agency provides immediate, life-saving relief and stay on to help people rebuild their lives.
The DR refresh challenge
Being an international charity, CAFOD need efficient and available IT systems to support its international fund raising activities - as well as donor and partner communications. The agency was well aware of the threats that could negatively impact the smooth running of its IT operations.
To address any potential downtime, CAFOD’s original DR consisted of system replication at its two South London offices – each employing Data Domain for backup. However, in the event of a major outage affecting these sites, the restoration of the charity’s systems involved a lengthy manual rebuild and recovery process - which wasn’t ideal for business continuity.
CAFOD’s planned move to a brand new, Central London office prompted them to consider a new DR method that could operate effectively on a single site. Being a charity also meant that cost was an important factor – without compromising on quality of service. CAFOD wanted the most modern, simple to use and flexible, DR system – that could deliver near immediate access to working recovery systems – from any location.
Finding high quality DR at best price
CAFOD first talked to Plan B at a trade show and felt that the Plan B Service offered an excellent fit for their requirements. Key factors in choosing Plan B were their proven track record, almost instant systems recovery guarantee and highly competitive costs – involving a generous charity discount.
Plan B provided a free initial trial period allowing CAFOD’s IT team to assess how effectively they could replicate and protect the charity’s 12 severs, supporting critical operational systems including mail, CRM, accounts and databases.
To set this up, Plan B’s intelligent snapshotting appliance was plugged into CAFOD’s network, and set up to automatically take snapshot copies of the charity’s IT systems. The system snapshots are then securely transferred to a Plan B data centre, where they are processed and reconfigured to run in the Plan B virtual environment as fully functioning systems - with identical functionality to the live servers.
The newly created system images (rescue images) are automatically updated every night and tested by Plan B to ensure that they can always be booted immediately - in the event of a disastrous loss of CAFOD’s live systems. As a result, Plan B guarantee CAFOD’s recoveries to be available within a specific number of minutes.
Once set up, CAFOD carried out a full test invocation to evaluate the service and check the functionality of each recovery server. The Charity was able to access their systems, via a VPN, in minutes and check every server and application worked in exactly the way they expected. This protection, enabled CAFOD to confidently migrate servers to their new site – with the peace of mind that their critical services were protected by Plan B.
Key benefits
Paul Hayward, infrastructure manager at CAFOD said, “Plan B are great people to work with and have provided us with an easy to use DR system that keeps working in the background - requiring almost no management from us. Invocation is only a phone call away and Plan B’s support staff are reassuringly experienced and very helpful.”
CAFOD’s systems are now protected by the DR service that employs a best practice approach to ensuring comprehensive business continuity for its operations. The agency now can recover from incidents as quickly and effectively as possible and continue its essential charity work - without delays.
Hayward concluded, “We are confident that with Plan B on board we have a DR system that will protect our operations and ensure business continuity – if we suffer any outages. The Plan B service really works, and has a very competitive price point - making it great value for money.”