Unique, guaranteed, disaster recovery service protects and fully restores IT firm’s working systems in 15 minutes – ensuring complete business continuity
Founded 21 years ago, Salmon is a highly innovative global systems integrator, with an ‘on-time, on-budget’ approach to the design, development, implementation and management of complex commerce based projects. Salmon’s services are increasingly embraced by the leading names in retail, insurance and the retail finance markets - including Swiss Re, Argos, Novae, Pets at Home, Boots and Halfords. Salmon prides itself on adding value to its customers’ day-to-day operations.
The continuity challenge
Being an IT services company, Salmon understand that a key factor in delivering good customer service is to ensure that IT systems remain uninterrupted. The company also appreciate that as well as the usual threats affecting IT operations, other incidents, such as power outages, fires or floods can prevent staff access to IT systems – and seriously damage the business.
Salmon originally employed an off-site data backup facility to provide IT systems recovery, in the event of an outage. However, restoring its systems involved a lengthy manual rebuild and recovery process - which wasn’t ideal for business continuity. This potential downtime and loss of business was not an option for Salmon’s 200 staff members, whose focus is on delivering customer projects.
After an internal IT review, Salmon’s disaster recovery (DR) approach was therefore deemed expensive, with limited capabilities. Salmon wanted the ability to bounce back almost instantly if any type of disastrous incident occurred.
This meant that the company needed a leading-edge, DR system in place that could provide near immediate access to working recovery systems, from any location. The DR service also needed to be cost-effective, simple to use and highly flexible.
Finding the perfect DR solution
Salmon had been in the process of migrating its systems, using VMware technology, to a virtual environment and liked the idea of capitalising on virtualisation for their DR. However, they also felt that outsourcing the DR capability to a specialist would provide a higher level of responsibility and be more cost effective.
Salmon reviewed a number of services and decided that Plan B offered a clear best fit for their requirements. A key factor in favour of Plan B being chosen was their extensive experience of making systems work in a new environment and their unique process that continually tests recovery systems are working and guarantees restoration in minutes – after an outage.
Plan B offered a compelling 30 day free trial involving the initial protection of three severs supporting Active Directory and Exchange systems. To set this up, Plan B’s intelligent snapshotting appliance was plugged into Salmon’s network, where it automatically takes copies of the IT systems - without any need for further IT staff assistance or disruption. The image copies are then sent securely to a Plan B data centre, where they are processed to run on their own network as fully functioning, interdependent machines.
The newly created system images (rescue images) are automatically tested by Plan B to guarantee that, in the event of a system outage, they will boot up without trouble and the critical operational systems will be quickly available for immediate use.
As part of the trial, Salmon were able to carry out a full test invocation of their recovery systems. The Exchange environment took under 15 minutes to boot up and Salmon were then able access the systems, via a VPN, and test every aspect to ensure they were fully working copies of their live servers.
Following this success, the Plan B service was expanded to protect nine of Salmon’s servers that run its critical operations including, call centre, email, file servers, HR and accounts applications.
Major benefits
Jeff Leaver, COO at Salmon said, “The Plan B system is simple to set up and requires minimal input to keep the service working. We are pleased that we now have a great DR system in place and are enjoying the peace of mind this brings. Invocation is a phone call away and Plan B’s support staff are highly experienced and very helpful.”
Salmon’s business systems are now protected by the DR service and the company has a best practice approach to ensuring comprehensive business continuity for its operations. The company is now assured that its staff can respond and recover from incidents as quickly and effectively as possible.
Leaver concluded, “Being an IT services company, technology is our business and having a best practice DR system is important for our customers, especially as it helps us deliver an excellent, consistent service. We are now confident that we have a DR system that enables us to experience business as usual - even if we experience a major IT outage. The Plan B service is fantastic - it really works, is very cost effective and represents superb value for money.”