UK Butler Tanner & Dennis Choose Plan B DR

Butler Tanner & Dennis has chosen Plan B DR to provide a fully managed, virtualisation-based business continuity and disaster recovery service.

This service has a 100% guarantee to deliver access to Butler Tanner & Dennis’ working recovery systems – avoiding any potentially damaging impact on its business, resulting from an IT incident.
 
The Plan B DR service, chosen after a free trial period, replaces Butler Tanner & Dennis’ out-dated approach to disaster recovery (DR). This had involved an expensive ‘ship to site’ service that covered aging IT equipment and did not offer DR testing or support rebuilding the shipped systems from the company’s backups.
 
John Wilson, IT Manager at Butler Tanner & Dennis, explains: "Our DR process was not effective – we used recovery tapes which were not a good long-term option, as they deteriorate over time and are no use if you have lost your machines. The Plan B DR service is simple to set up, requires no further input from us and offers real peace of mind. The service is also great value for money and any costs outweigh the financial implications of system failure."
 
Plan B automatically take nightly snapshot copies of Butler Tanner & Dennis’ live IT systems – including an MIS system – covering print, finance, database and terminal service applications. The system snapshots are then securely uploaded to a Plan B data centre, and Plan B’s system automatically processes and reconfigures the images to run natively on Plan B’s virtual recovery environment as fully functioning, identical copies of the company’s live servers.
 
The Plan B automatically update the newly created system ‘rescue images’ each day and test them individually and as an interdependent set. This 100% testing regime is unique to Plan B’s service and ensures that Butler Tanner & Dennis’ servers will always be immediately recovered – in the event of an outage.
 
Once the service was set-up and working, Butler Tanner & Dennis carried out several full test invocations, on different networks, to evaluate the service and check the functionality of each recovery server. They were able to access their systems, via a VPN, within 20 minutes of starting the recovery and were amazed to establish that every server and application worked, and mirrored the live servers in every way.
 
Wilson added: "Another major benefit of this clever Plan B service is our backup images are tested every day – so that if our VSS-based backup fails, Plan B will advise us about it. This also means that we gain a real insight into the performance and potential threats to our own systems."