Introduction
Advanced Technology Products is an Irish distributor of cleanroom and ionising equipment, supplying industries across the country from its base in Limerick. The company has operated for over 20 years.
Challenge
Hybrid was brought in to take over management and control of the company’s existing blade servers and rebuild its virtual machines using Hyper V. The infrastructure included several virtual servers running the soon to be unsupported Windows Server 2003, along with a separate server running Exchange 2003. Advanced Technology Products needed a disaster recovery solution combining onsite replication with offsite snapshot storage, along with a move to Microsoft Exchange 2010 for a more secure and reliable email platform.
Solution
- Full rebuild of the site’s IT infrastructure
- Onsite replicated server for fast recovery
- Offsite snapshots for added protection against data loss
- Complete rebuild of all virtual machines on existing hardware using Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper V
- Onsite migration of email to Microsoft Exchange 2010
Results
Advanced Technology Products now runs on a stable, reliable server infrastructure backed by a complete disaster recovery setup. The migration to Microsoft Exchange 2010 gave the business a secure, dependable mail service it could count on day to day.
Backup creates copies of data so files can be restored if lost or corrupted. Disaster recovery covers rebuilding the entire IT environment, including servers, applications and network access, after an outage. Backup protects your data. Disaster recovery gets your business operating again.
Costs vary with business size, recovery speed and data volume, but small businesses typically invest a few hundred to a few thousand euro a month for managed disaster recovery. The real cost comparison is against downtime, which often runs into thousands of euro per hour of lost operations.
A solid IT disaster recovery plan should include a list of critical systems and their recovery priority, onsite and offsite backup methods, defined recovery time and recovery point objectives, clear roles and responsibilities, and a regular testing schedule to confirm it works.
