About the Business
Our client is an international industry leader in architectural visualisation specialising in CGI’s (Computer Generated Images), animation and virtual reality technologies.
Industry: Architecture Visualisation
Organisation Size: 50-100 employees
Service Areas: Business Continuity as a Service, Managed Services (Datacentre), Professional Services. Private Cloud Migration.
Challenge
The management team have always perceived technology to be an enabler both to the business and its employees. Given the nature of the business naturally it was expected from such an advanced technology-first firm to be at the forefront of all technological solutions in their industry.
The business went through a rapid growth over the past few years which resulted in the management team taking a more pragmatic approach towards business continuity.
Being located in multiple parts of the world also meant that in the event of a disaster the business would need to react instantly and to have been prepared with the right technologies to face the unprecedented.
Following a few brain-storming sessions and having reviewed multiple solutions ranging from hosting their business continuity solutions in Azure Cloud, Private Cloud Datacentres in the UK or abroad, Amazon EC2 Cold and Hot replicas of their production data we came to the conclusion that a centralised solution by far will outweigh the amount of effort a decentralised solution will introduce to the business.
With the above in mind the business is used to produced near 500GB’s of changes in data throughout the week translating into near 2TB of data throughout the month. Whilst having in production a total of 100TB of data, a further 200TB in archives it was apparent that the various solutions proposed as part of the previous brain-storming sessions will need to stand the scrutiny of the financials before a viable option was chosen.
Solution
+ Utilise the existing servers from the production site which were recently upgraded
+ Create a replica infrastructure of all servers ranging from file servers, application servers and domain controllers in the primary datacentre.
+ Using Veeam Cloud Connect and VMware replication technologies ensure that the data is replicated using high levels of data encryption whilst being checked for ransomware to the primary failover site.
+ Create an air-gapped backup solution at the secondary failover site with the necessary end user compute in the event of a disaster.
+ Monitor the business continuity infrastructure and carry out drill test twice a year to ensure the infrastructure is able to deliver at any given point in time.
+ Upgraded primary failover site to 10Gb network cross connectivity between storage and servers allowing for faster replication times over the MPLS connection.
Outcome
The business now operates a replica infrastructure of all critical production virtual servers at a primary datacentre site allowing instant failover should the production site servers not be available.
In the unlikely event where the workstations infrastructure is inaccessible the business is able to provide near 30% of its senior level employees with a physical end user compute device matching the specifications of their current machines. Furthermore, utilising Azure Virtual Desktop we’re able to expand the availability of machines to the cloud as and when needed.
The business was now fully operating in the cloud, had increased its agility and effectiveness, had further enabled and empowered it’s employees.
Services Taken: Veeam Cloud Connect, Managed Virtual Infrastructure [VMware], Datacentre Hosting [E14], Datacentre Hosting [EC1]
