Booking Services International Implements Double-Take Availability

Vision Solutions Inc. announced that Booking Services International (BSI), an UK’s accommodation and event management company, has implemented Double-Take Availability as part of a wider business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) strategy. The new implementation provides BSI with improved protection for its physical and virtual IT resources against the risk of downtime, as well as delivering real-time replication for the company’s systems and data over a low bandwidth Internet connection.

BSI provides accommodation, meeting and event management services to enterprise, public sector organisations and SMEs in the UK. It handles bookings for over 1.7 million hotel rooms per year, as well as managing more than 17,000 events and conferences. The company’s continuity and DR plan is a critical part of its business efforts, as it serves customers both online and offline.

BSI is using Double-Take Availability to replicate data from its central office over to a remote site. The company’s production data centre is based on a mixture of physical and virtualised servers, and these are replicated across a low bandwidth Internet link to remote virtual machines running on VMware vSphere. Double-Take Availability provides byte level replication, so only the changes to systems or data files are replicated over; BSI also has Riverbed Steelhead WAN Optimisation appliances in place to further streamline the Internet traffic between the two sites.

Mark Conabeare, systems and network security manager at BSI, commented: "Our business depends on a number of core applications as part of our client service. We were looking at how to improve our existing business continuity and DR plans, and moving data from our existing production site to a remote location was one area that we wanted to improve. We considered using VMware Site Recovery Manager and SAN-to-SAN replication, but the lack of available bandwidth and the cost to implement this approach was excessive. Using Double-Take Availability meant that we could meet our requirements around bandwidth, as well as supporting the mixture of physical and virtual servers that we have in place."

"Combining virtualisation and storage area networks can provide a good foundation for business continuity, but it is not the right solution in all circumstances, particularly when you are faced with pressures of bandwidth, location, or cost," said Ian Masters, UK sales director for Vision Solutions. "Double-Take Availability offers a way to deliver the benefits of real-time replication for physical and virtual servers, as well as being able to cope with low bandwidth conditions."

Double-Take Availability provides organisations with real-time replication for their Windows, Linux and virtualised servers, ensuring maximum protection against data loss. This approach allows organisations to implement continuity and recovery plans for all their servers with one product, and across any geographic distance. With Double-Take Availability, companies can replicate virtual machines from one host to another in real time, including between different virtualisation platforms.