Canopius Uses Double-Take Software on Lefthand iSCSI SAN

Double-Take Software announced that Canopius, a specialist underwriting and insurance group based in London, has completed a business continuity and storage infrastructure migration project using Double-Take Move.

This approach, designed by leading provider of data availability and business continuity solutions CWL Systems, has provided Canopius with better protection against adverse events, as well as leading to a significant reduction in the time taken to complete the implementation.

Canopius had an existing Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) from HP that was rapidly approaching capacity, as well as leading to additional charges with the company’s disaster recovery site provider. In order to continue supporting business growth and reduce costs, a new storage infrastructure had to be implemented. Brent Gebbie, Infrastructure Manager at Canopius had decided that a new iSCSI SAN from LeftHand Networks would meet the company’s needs. However, migrating from one SAN provider to a different vendor, and from one type of storage network to another, represented an enormous headache for the IT team.

Mr. Gebbie worked with partner CWL Systems to find an alternative method for migrating the company’s data. CWL Systems recommended Double-Take Move as a way to move all the existing data to the new SAN in a faster, more efficient manner. “Before we looked at Double-Take, it would have taken us several weeks to complete our new implementation, and caused a severe delay to when the new SAN would deliver value back to the business. With Double-Take Move, we were able to get this completed automatically in a few days. This represented both a massive time saving, as well as reducing the cost involved in the overall project,” said Mr. Gebbie. “Overall, we expect to save around £180,000 through this implementation compared to our previous approach; the whole project pays for itself within two years.”

Following on from the migration, Canopius has now installed its previous Fibre Channel SAN at the company’s hosted disaster recovery site, providing the business with a more efficient continuity strategy. Double-Take is used to replicate all company data from the new iSCSI SAN through to the DR site, where back-up versions of the company’s servers are hosted as virtual machines and updated in real time. This provides more up-to-date copies of the company’s critical workloads and data, as well as drastically reducing the time taken to recover in the event of a full site failure. Whereas the recovery time was previously estimated to be several days, Canopius can now have its full systems back up and available at its DR site within 45 minutes.

“Double-Take’s role within this project is crucial – it provides the simplest, most efficient way for Canopius to protect its critical data, as well as allowing us to re-use our previous SAN to improve our continuity and recovery strategy for the future,” explained Mr. Gebbie. “With CWL, we have successfully tested our fail-over strategy, and we can have our full set of applications available for use within minutes.”

“The implementation at Canopius demonstrates how organisations can really optimise the ways in which they run their IT systems and workloads independently of the physical IT resources that are in place. Instead of having to invest in further hardware or rely on inefficient tape-based back-up, Canopius has achieved a significantly more flexible IT infrastructure, better business continuity support and at a lower cost,” commented Ian Masters, UK sales and marketing director at Double-Take Software. “Double-Take’s data migration solutions, coupled with storage and server virtualisation, demonstrate how IT can provide real value back to the business both now and in the future.”