China Development Bank

Solution

The bank began investigating its options for creating a single, standardized backup and recovery process for its core Windows servers.

“One of the major selection criteria was VMware integration,” said the bank’s senior manager, Fengde Lin. “We have VMware virtualized servers and traditional dedicated servers, so it was important that the new solution should be able to work with both physical and virtual environments. We tested products from several vendors and compared to these other products; PlateSpin Migrate was the best option for our environment. We also felt that it offered excellent price and performance, stability and ease of use.”

The bank bought 36 PlateSpin Migrate licenses and was able to quickly go live with the solution. “We use PlateSpin Migrate to create scheduled virtual replicas of our business-critical production systems,” said Zhang. “The replication takes place while the servers are still in active operation.

PlateSpin Migrate is able to complete the system protection work without affecting normal business operations. If a production server fails, we can simply switch to the replica and bring the system back online within about fifteen minutes.” “PlateSpin Migrate minimizes the impact of backup processes on the rest of the IT landscape, which improves overall performance,” said Lin. “Moreover, because the process is completely automated, it reduces workload for our IT teams and avoids the risk of human error.”

Results

Zhang said of the bank’s results with PlateSpin Migrate, “Instead of a complex process where each system has its own backup tools and lengthy recovery process, we now have a single, simple method for protecting our systems and data. If one of our production servers develops a problem, we can restore it with just a few mouse clicks – easily within our corporate recovery time objective of 20 minutes.”

Because PlateSpin Migrate creates hardware-independent virtual replicas of the production servers, the bank no longer maintains specific dedicated servers for each system at the disaster recovery site. It needs only one physical server for every 15 replicas – dramatically reducing hardware costs.

“The software is easy to use and will save a lot of time – not only in the event of a disaster, but also in terms of day-to-day administration,” said Lin. “Although previously it was possible to convert physical servers into virtual servers, each conversion required a complete replication. By contrast, PlateSpin Migrate makes it simple.

The software is easy to use, and will save a lot of time – not only in the event of a disaster, but also in terms of day-to-day administration.