Become Disaster Recovery ready with Microsoft and Symantec

Client Understanding

South Point provides a national footprint catering specifically around student accommodation, South Point had an urgent requirement of maximizing the available technology stack offered through mainstream provides such as Microsoft and Symantec. 

To provide a technical roadmap that demonstrated a corporate infrastructure win, allowing localised high availability and a disaster recovery strategy. AVeS was required to carry out the technical design process to meet business requirements and thus ensuring data, as well as the associated access, was available through a segregated Internet Service Provider (ISP) Datacentre.

Roadmap Approach

A full understanding of applications as well as hardware dependencies was illustrated through various audits. Furthermore, technical workshops were also conducted with all client service providers in order to define the core business components. From these workshops, we were able to design an application-aware site resilient cluster. This ensured that all aspects of the Infrastructure were locally resilient to hardware failure as well as data corruption through an intelligent replication schedule. Coupled with the inclusion of an industry standard backup product, Symantec Backup Exec 2012, we were able to utilize Data De-duplication thus creating a long term restoration point of data.

Solution

With this architecture designed, a technical deployment document was drawn up and the application stack was implemented. Two Microsoft Hyper-V clusters were introduced and all related services were re-homed into this highly available platform. The secondary cluster was deployed into an ISP datacentre provisioning all the resilient links and thus services to remote regions in the event of a disaster being triggered.

 Leveraging off the newly provided Dell server and storage infrastructure and coupled with Microsoft Server 2012 with Hyper-V, we allowed for native replication on an Operating system level. This ensured that often costly Hardware replication technology was not required for site replication. Furthermore, all instances in the primary site were replicated on a 15-minute schedule for always-available recovery points. Application-aware clustering features delivered through the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, ensured that the delivery of critical Messaging platforms is always available through a cross-site DAG (Database Availability Group).

Final Outcomes

“Delivery of the total solution within a limited time frame was always going to be a challenge. Through the use of industry standards such as MSF (Microsoft Solutions FrameWork) we were confident that the solution was correctly planned and architected.” – explains Charl Ueckermann, Managing Director at AVeS “ Zero migration downtime together with an error-free delivery solution was key. Furthermore, all associated recovery documentation was also imperative to have the confidence that SouthPoint does not fall victim to circumstances which would trigger a Disaster Recovery” – says Ueckermann.

About AVeS

AVeS combines expert knowledge and services with leading technologies to provide comprehensive information security and infrastructure solutions. Working off 15-years of migration strategies, as well as effective designing of various platforms, we pride ourselves in offering an out-of-the-box approach to many tricky situations in which companies find themselves. We create a multi-phase approach to the technologies, we streamline business spend and ensure compliance with regard to IT infrastructure.

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