14/12/2009
Yarra Ranges mitigates risk with Managed DR
Yarra Ranges Council partners with Global Storage to mitigate Disaster Recovery risk.
Yarra Ranges Council has partnered with leading Australian Disaster Recovery provider Global Storage, to deliver a fully managed backup and disaster recovery service to protect the organisation's IT systems and business data in the event of a disaster.
Located on the eastern fringe of Melbourne's metropolitan area, Yarra Ranges Council provides essential services to the community that need to be available and accessible during a disaster.
"The destruction caused by the devastating Black Saturday Bushfires is a reminder of our vulnerability to a disaster occurring, so we need to be very well prepared and minimise our risk in all areas." says Craig Whalley, Manager Information Services.
Protecting the organisation's data and systems is one such area, which is critical to the ongoing operation of the Council, during and after a disaster.
"We have moved to a very heavy reliance on IT systems, so it is imperative that we have a disaster recovery strategy that enables us to access our data and systems. If we can minimise downtime we can avoid the disruption and inconvenience caused by having to rely on manual systems." says Craig.
Yarra Ranges simplified the path to upgrading their Disaster Recovery by implementing a VMware environment in their data centre which reduced more than 50 physical servers to around 6. As Yarra Ranges began to explore what options were available for disaster recovery, they became aware of the Global Storage solution which was being used by other organisations including, state government departments, local councils and private industry. The Global Storage solution provided a fully managed disaster recovery capability with the add on of a remote backup service for offsite backup and online recovery of data.
Yarra Ranges decided that outsourcing disaster recovery was a more attractive option and that including a backup service as part of the disaster recovery strategy was highly desirable. A tender was issued for an 'Outsourced Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery Service' and after a lengthy review process Global Storage was selected as the preferred provider with their EnvironmentReady managed disaster recovery and DataReady managed backup services.
As Craig explains "A key reason we selected Global Storage to deliver disaster recovery and backup services was their proposal ticked all of the boxes from an auditing requirements perspective – it has infrastructure in place, secure data transfer, it can be fully tested, we can prove that it works and we can deliver a response time of less than 24 hours."
Yarra Ranges were also impressed with the experience and expertise that Global Storage had in these areas. "We liked the fact that disaster recovery and backup are Global Storage's core business unlike some other vendors. Global Storage has an impressive customer base of reputable organisations who highly recommended Global Storage and their disaster recovery and backup solutions" says Craig.
Client recovery was a key consideration for Yarra Ranges in selecting Global Storage. They needed a solution that provided an office location for key decision makers to go to and access data in the event of a disaster. It was also important that the disaster recovery solution enabled users to be able to connect in remotely.
"The EnvironmentReady service addresses all of our requirements for disaster recovery – we will be able to restore data to a data centre, have desks provided immediately for staff to access and remote users will be able to connect using our Citrix environment via the Internet." says Craig.
Yarra Ranges could see value for money in Global Storage's combined solution for disaster recovery and backup. The Data Ready backup service provided a valuable add on to disaster recovery for Yarra Ranges and is expected to improve efficiency of backup times and further mitigate risk in relation to the protection and recovery of their data.
Craig says "Our data will be backed up in a more efficient manner and will be immediately offsite by the end of the day. The deduplication technology, used in the DataReady service significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred, meaning the backup finishes earlier and the data is offsite quicker than before. This further reduces our risk."
Another key selection criteria for outsourced disaster recovery was the management of the recovery process, providing Yarra Ranges the peace of mind that the resources and people are available to manage a disaster recovery situation.
"We liked the fully managed aspect of Global Storage's disaster recovery service - if we have a disaster a dedicated team of experts will recover our environment and will also do the fail-back once the disaster has been resolved" says Craig.
Yarra Ranges expect to have the backup service fully implemented by the end of the year with the disaster recovery service up and running with full testing by February 2010.
