Firth Rixon Chooses NexStor To Supply Business Continuity Solution
Troy Platts, 11/02/2010, posted in "Analysis"
Troy Platts is a founder & joint Managing Director at NexStor. His role involves the day to day running of this successful and dynamic Data Systems Integrator. Troy has ...more info
Troy Platts is a founder & joint Managing Director at NexStor. His role involves the day to day running of this successful and dynamic Data Systems Integrator. Troy has been fundamental in breaking new technologies here in the UK, working with U.S & Israeli startups to gain a foot print and referencable client base within the EMEA region. In his previous roles Troy has worked for numerous Channel orgaisations specialising in Large Tier 1 Storage Projects working with some of Europes Largest Enterprises. ...less info
Firth Rixson is a provider of rings, forgings and metal products. Paul Armitage, the Group Systems Executive, was faced with a growing company and an expanding worldwide IT infrastructure that needed to be supported.
“In Sheffield we support in excess of 100 servers and the recovery time could potentially be several days following a major outage. We needed to reduce that to a few hours – this is critical in our business. We also needed to provide near 24/7 support as the business is based in Europe, Hungary, China and the U.S.” said Paul.
Paul has a long history of working with my company so I started to discuss a solution with him. I recommended a combination of Nexsan’s SATABeast, Overland’s SAS SAN arrays and InMage DR Scout replication software. “NexStor know our business and spent time to find the best and most cost effective solution for us. They looked at alternatives more than any other supplier. They understand what we are trying to achieve and the relationship works well,” said Paul.
The new system provides business continuity across the Firth Rixson Group. All day to day backup is from disk although tape is still used to store data off site for life. Paul Armitage states: “It gives us a Recovery Time Objective of three minutes and we can roll back any server in about one minute. It gives us point in time roll back and, in the case of major maintenance, we can fail over between Sheffield and our DR centre without impacting the users.
“The SATABeast gives us reliability and cost benefits over SAS arrays. We didn’t need especially fast disk storage but did need high capacity. Even when temporarily running four exchange servers it performed well. It is price competitive, I was worried that you might ‘get what you pay for’ but it’s very resilient – which is why we bought two more,” Paul said.
“The Overland ULTAMUS 1200s give us the flexibility of SAN storage which is tied to our goal of implementing a VMware based virtual environment. Furthermore, the InMage software has given us real-time replication for all mission critical servers in a format that is relatively easy to implement. It’s not overly complex; in fact we are running it here and installing it ourselves in the U.S.” Paul states.
I am really pleased with the solution we provided to Firth Rixson, which involves some cutting-edge storage solutions. The implementation went well and I am proud of the end result – a really cost effective and highly available system.
If you’d like to discuss any of the challenges I faced implementing the business continuity solution across the Firth Rixson Group, please add your comments below and I’ll get back to you.
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