Disaster Recovery: A Case Study

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Disaster Recovery A Case Study

• By Chuck Vermillion
• CEO Founder

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Disaster Recovery
Companies often depend heavily on 24/7
availability of scheduling, CRM and communication
systems. In the event of a major production
failure, companies need redundancy, reliability
and geographic diversity in these systems. The
following is a case study outlining how a global
company implemented a disaster recovery solution
to replicate and validate proprietary data and
more.
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The Company
The company has been a world leader in hair loss
and medical hair restoration for more than 35
years. Throughout its history, the company has
performed almost 200,000 hair transplant
procedures on men and women from 60 different
nations. The company helps people who suffer
from hair loss and progressive baldness by using
advanced techniques to achieve natural
results. The company operates eighty-five
locations throughout the U.S.A., Canada and
Mexico.
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The Challenge

• The companys success depends on 24/7
  availability of its scheduling, CRM and
  communication systems. In the event of a major
  production failure, the company needed
  redundancy, reliability and geographic diversity
  in these systems.
• Specifically, the disaster recovery solution
  required
• Replicating and validating proprietary data with
  aggressive RTO and RPO targets.
• A disaster recovery environment that could
  connect with its existing nationwide MPLS WAN -
  automated failover and routing was critical so
  remote sites have infrastructure access.
• Adequate IT resources to operate a 24/7
  environment in the event of a disaster - without
  putting a drain on the companys finances.

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Disaster Recovery Solution
A disaster recovery solution provider duplicated
the hair restoration companys production
infrastructure to a hosted and managed DR
environment in their cloud infrastructure.
Specific services, which are guaranteed by the
solution providers 99.99 service level
agreement, include Managed Hosting in the
providers Data Centers. The solution provider
hosts and manages the hair restoration companys
physical and virtual cloud-based, disaster
recovery servers, software and web-based
applications in its data centers. These data
centers meet the stringent requirements for Tier
3, SAS70 Type II backed operational facilities,
are maintained 24/7 by an on-site team, and
provide the hair restoration company with a DR
environment that would otherwise be
inaccessible.
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Disaster Recovery Solution
Virtual Private Servers (VPS). The solution
providers VPS infrastructure provides a low
cost, scalable and flexible infrastructure for
the hair restoration company without the need for
hardware life-cycle management. VPS keeps the
hair restoration companys capital costs for its
DR infrastructure at a minimum. Disaster
Recovery Replication. An investment in disaster
recovery would be useless without replicating
critical data from production to the disaster
recovery environment. DR provides aggressive RTO
and RPO times by using solutions such as SAN, VM
and file level replication.
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Disaster Recovery Solution
WAN Connectivity Solutions. MPLS WAN
connectivity allows the hair restoration
companys remote offices to effectively access
the DR environment in the event of a production
failure. The provider offers a carrier neutral
environment and cross-connects from the
telecommunications demarc to the hair restoration
companys hosted DR environment. Should a
production failure occur, the hair restoration
companys systems are accessed over the MPLS
network via the additional MPLS link at the
providers data centers.
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Disaster Recovery
Mitigating to a disaster recovery solution
providers private cloud environment provided the
following benefits 99.99 guaranteed server and
network availability, no hardware life-cycles to
manage, survivability and redundancy, flexibility
and scalability, lower IT costs and peace of
mind. The hair restoration company has a partner
to help create, monitor and maintain a more
robust DR environment. The solution provider not
only hosts the hair restoration companys DR
infrastructure, but manages it with leading
expertise, advanced technologies and significant
cost efficiencies.
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About the Author
Chuck Vermillion is CEO and founder of OneNeck
IT Services, a leading provider of mid-market
enterprise hosting and managed services since
1997. For more information about disaster
recovery solutions, visit http//www.oneneck.com/