NASA Enterprise Application Competency Center Implemented Vblock

NASA has implemented Vblock Infrastructure Platforms from VCE Company, LLC. as the foundation of its new backup and recovery solution for its NASA Enterprise Application Competency Center (NEACC) of which SAP is the flagship application in this environment.

This solution transforms NASA’s disaster recovery process from a tape-and-truck model to a virtualized solution where information can be recovered at the push of a button. This new IT solution, based on VCE converged infrastructure technology, is designed to save NASA significant time and money while ensuring business critical information remains available whenever it is needed.

NASA Reduces Recovery Time
of Critical Data from Days to Hours
NASA, with 18,000 employees, has strict government standards for keeping, storing, accessing and recovering information. NASA’s previous disaster recovery system for its NEACC suite of applications included backing up crucial information from its Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) NASA Datacenter location to tape, making multiple copies of the tapes for added protection, and then manually transporting those tapes to a secure outsourced location, a process that could take up to four days to complete. In the event that the back-up data was needed, NASA personnel would fly to the secondary location to activate the system and then manage the system from that site.

With the new VCE solution, which includes EMC Recover Point and VMware Site Recovery Manager software, critical information is now replicated and mirrored online eliminating the expensive and time-consuming method of tape back-up. Now NASA has a push-button failover capability from its primary location to the disaster recovery location meaning the primary production environment is never more than a few minutes out of sync from its peer at the disaster recovery location. Also, because the virtualized solution can be managed remotely, NASA can reduce its recovery time of crucial data from days to hours.

NASA Enterprise Application Competency Center (NEACC), hosting its Vblock solution at Kennedy Space Center, is planning to further consolidate its IT infrastructure and take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.

Neil Rodgers NEACC Manager and Deputy CIO at Marshall Space Flight Center, said: "In today’s environment, we don’t have the luxury of four days to gain access to any of our systems or critical information. We needed a new way to ensure if our systems went down for any reason, that we had an agile and lightning-quick recovery process. The VCE solution is flexible enough to allow us to simply access our systems but also robust enough to expand as our needs grow."