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Databarracks wanted to provide better, faster, more reliable disaster recovery for customers – and at lower cost

Databarracks logo

Products and services

Outcomes

  • Reduced RTO and RPO to less than an hour
  • Introduced self-service disaster recovery testing with no added fees
  • Increased flexibility by allocating disk space and processor capacity on an as-needed basis

Challenge

The organization needed to improve RPO and RTO and reduce fees to improve its disaster recovery service offerings.

Many customers can’t afford prolonged system downtime, even in the case of a major disaster. Databarracks works to offer customers short recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO), helping them cut business risk.

Databarracks previously offered a typical RPO of eight to 24 hours, and RTO of potentially up to 24 hours depending on the volume of customer data – often unacceptably long for mission-critical business applications. Because of operational complexity and the time required from IT staff, Databarracks had no choice but to charge for disaster recovery tests.

If Databarracks could improve RPO and RTO, and enable more frequent testing, all while cutting fees to customers, it could gain significant business advantage.

Details

Solution

Databarracks chose to consolidate and standardize disaster recovery processes for its customers, covering both Linux- and Windows based solutions. By eliminating multiple standalone products and automating procedures, Databarracks could cut operational costs, reduce the internal staffing and training workload, and dramatically enhance its RPO and RTO offerings to customers.

Oliver Mather, Technical Director of Databarracks, said, “We realized that we were using too many tools in too many ways. Looking at possible solutions, we wanted disaster recovery capabilities that were easy to manage, cost effective and comprehensive in scope. On that basis, Databarracks selected PlateSpin Migrate as a strategic platform, providing a single, consolidated and centralized disaster recovery solution.”

PlateSpin Migrate offers full disaster recovery services to protect both physical and virtual workloads, delivering rapid RTO and RPO and strong performance at an attractive price. As PlateSpin Migrate uses virtual machines to automate and accelerate recovery processes, there is no need to pre-stage and configure a suitable physical target server for recovery purposes.

By removing error-prone manual steps, PlateSpin Migrate enables super-rapid disaster recovery measured in minutes.

In the past, customers looked to recover within a day, whereas now they look for less than half a day or even less than an hour in total outage.

Oliver Mather
Technical Director, Databarracks

Mather said, “PlateSpin Migrate integrates with our own virtualized VMware landscapes, has eliminated much of the manual technical effort, and greatly reduced in-house systems complexity.”

Results

By selecting PlateSpin Migrate, Databarracks has transformed its disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering. For typical protected workloads, Databarracks is now able to offer both RPO and RTO of less than an hour. Depending on data volumes and the number of servers, in some cases Databarracks is able to complete full disaster recovery in significantly less than an hour. Mather said, “With PlateSpin Migrate, we can allocate disk space and processor capacity on an as-needed basis. In the event of disaster or the need to fail over, we can burst into additional resources, delivering a flexible, high-performance service to customers while offering very attractive commercial rates because we do not need redundant compute capacity.”

Additionally, PlateSpin Migrate makes it easy for customers to complete their own regular disaster recovery testing. Whereas previously Databarracks charged a fee for disaster recovery tests, the self-service solution is free of charge, which encourages more frequent testing and gives Databarracks a clear competitive edge. “For our customers, lengthy downtime is simply not an option,” said Mather.

PlateSpin Migrate allows us to offer fast, reliable disaster recovery at a competitive price, giving our customers greater peace of mind and providing Databarracks with a crucial commercial advantage over other service providers.

Oliver Mather
Technical Director, Databarracks

About Databarracks

Databarracks logo

Databarracks specializes in providing massively reliable, secure and always-available data center services for corporate customers. With physical systems located in an ex-military bunker buried some 30m below ground, Databarracks provides exceptional business resilience for mission-critical applications.

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