Salmon Has Chosen Plan B DR

IT firm Salmon, has chosen Plan B DR, to provide a managed, virtualisation-based business continuity and disaster recovery service. The service can restore Salmon’s IT systems in 15 minutes, offering almost instant business continuity – if any type of outage occurs.

 
The Plan B DR service replaces Salmon’s off-site data backup facility and removes the challenge of a lengthy manual rebuild and recovery process. Salmon had been in the process of migrating its systems, using VMware technology, to a virtual environment and liked the idea of capitalising on virtualisation for their disaster recovery (DR).
 
Plan B DR initially offered Salmon a 30 day free trial involving the protection of severs supporting Active Directory and Exchange systems. To set this up, Plan B DR’s intelligent snapshotting appliance was plugged into Salmon’s network, where it automatically takes copies of the IT systems – without any need for further IT staff assistance or disruption. The image copies are then sent securely to a Plan B DR data centre, where they are processed to run on their own network as fully functioning, interdependent machines. The newly created system images (rescue images) are automatically tested by Plan B DR to guarantee that, in the event of a system outage, they will boot up without trouble and the critical operational systems will be available for immediate use.
 
As part of the trial, Salmon were able to carry out a test invocation of their recovery systems. The Exchange environment took under 15 minutes to boot up and Salmon were then able access the systems, via a VPN, and test every aspect to ensure they were working copies of their live servers.  
 
Jeff Leaver, COO at Salmon said: "The Plan B DR system is simple to set up and requires minimal input to keep the service working. We are pleased that we now have a great DR system in place and are enjoying the peace of mind this brings. Invocation is a phone call away and Plan B’s support staff are highly experienced and very helpful."
 
The Plan B DR service was expanded to protect Salmon’s other servers running its critical operations including, call centre, email, file servers, HR and accounts applications.
 
Leaver concluded: "Being an IT services company, technology is our business and having a best practice DR system is important for our customers, especially as it helps us deliver an excellent, consistent service.  We are now confident that we have a DR system that enables us to experience business as usual – even if we experience a major IT outage. The Plan B DR service is fantastic – it really works, is very cost effective and represents superb value for money."