Case Study: Business Continuity

Client: Health Food Distributor

Industry: Retail

Service: Infrastructure Services > Business Continuity

Hardware: x86 based Dell 2950 server.

Software: Vmware VI3

The Situation: Our client is a pioneer health food distributor. The software platform was primarily based on Microsoft applications such as Exchange 2003, SQL server 2000, Microsoft proxy server. Client used Active Directory for authentication and CRM for business analytics. The client was looking for a service provider who could offer a comprehensive business continuity solution for server infrastructure.

The Challenge: The servers were backed up with weekly full and daily incremental backup schedule. Although the company had regular backups on the servers, they did not have a business continuity plan in case of failure of any of the critical servers..

The Response: i³ understood the requirement and proposed couple of options to the customer with pros/cons of each solution including the price. One of the option was to perform a P2V using VMware ESX environment and keep the backups of the physical servers in case of failure on any of physical server. The option was to turn on the backup virtual machine while the physical restore was getting done. The other solution was to identify critical servers and plan for high availability using clustering, disk redundancy and identifying single point of failure on all of those critical servers.

The Solution: The solution gave the customer a solid business continuity plan and peace of mind knowing they have a backup solution which can be turned on as quickly as switching on a button.