VirtualSharp Strengthens UK W&O Events Agency’s DR Strategy

VirtualSharp
Software Corporation, a provider DR solutions for private and public clouds, announced that its ReliableDR has helped event management agency W&O Events Ltd to strengthen its DR strategy.

This organisation can now carry out fully
automated daily DR testing of its business critical applications,
something previously impossible due to the traditional challenges presented by
such tests.

W&O Events Management is a specialist event management agency
and an expert provider of solutions for international events, motivation and
travel management so it is reliant on data access. IT Director
Chris Costin and his team were aware of the potential impact of downtime to the
business should a disaster strike. In order to minimise this risk W&O
Events Management made an investment in dual data centres
and two Dell Compellent SANs. These provided a large, centralised pool of
storage for the VMware hosts at the primary and secondary sites with
array-based snapshots of business critical VMs taken at regular intervals. For
DR purposes, each snapshot was asynchronously replicated from the primary data
centre to the SAN at the secondary data centre.

However despite having these measures in place, W&O Events
Management was still exposed, as the team was unable to DR test its
business-critical systems on a regular basis, as this process remained a
complex and time-consuming task.

Prior to discovering ReliableDR, W&O Events
Management had looked at a variety of DR solutions, including VMware SRM.
However, Costin’s team didn’t see SRM as an attractive option because it
required an upgrade to the licenses, which was felt to be unnecessary and
prohibitively expensive. In addition, SRM was not able to perform
application-aware level DR testing or protect against rolling disaster
scenarios, such as a virus attacks or data corruption.

From the outset, the benefits of the ReliableDR
solution were instead quite obvious as W&O Events Management had already
virtualised its business-critical IT services (Exchange, SharePoint etc.).
Therefore after a thorough review of the various options, a decision was made
to select ReliableDR, and the solution was deployed into the
production environment the following week.

Chris Costin said: "Since
installing ReliableDR, we have been confident that should a disaster strike, we
would know exactly how long it would take to fully recover our business
critical applications, whatever the scenario. Many organisations do not perform
Disaster Recovery tests because they place a significant burden on IT resources
but thanks to VirtualSharp, we now carry out tests daily without straining our
infrastructure."

Michael Hillewaert, VP EMEA Sales at VirtualSharp Software said:
"The range of risks IT
infrastructures are facing is increasing in line with the adoption of new
technologies, and this makes it nearly impossible to predict and then manage
this exposure. For IT services to be adequately protected, Disaster Recovery
strategies needn’t just be present, they must be regularly tested and this is
what we successfully allow organisations such as W&O Events Management to
do."