Meizhou Municipal Information Centre
The Meizhou Municipal Information Centre’s small staff provides and maintains information services to the city through the government portal site, extranet and data center
Products and services
Outcomes
- Cut costs by 80 percent
- Provided the ability to get the Meizhou municipal government website up and running with no loss of data within half an hour
Challenge
The IT staff wanted to avoid downtime and improve backup and recovery.
The Meizhou Municipal Information Centre has nine people to provide and maintain information services to the city, and to run the e-Government network, extranet and data center. In order to offer the best possible service to its clients, avoiding downtime is a high priority. A key responsibility at the Information Centre is running the government portal site, where the municipal government posts bulletins and documents.
“It is vital that we publish government information on time,” said Jian Chen, vice director at Meizhou Municipal Information Centre. “There is an unofficial rule that more than 12 hours downtime is simply not acceptable. However, we felt there must be a cost-effective way to improve on this.”
Details
Solution
The team at Meizhou Municipal Information Centre conducted a number of trials to test different disaster recovery (DR) solutions. It selected OpenText PlateSpin Forge due to its faultless performance during the trial period.
“We felt that the other solutions simply could not match PlateSpin Forge on maturity or performance,” said Chen. “PlateSpin Forge is easy to set up and manage through the web-based console and scored highly on configurability and security compared to competing offerings.”
PlateSpin Forge is a self-contained disaster recovery hardware appliance capable of protecting up to 25 server workloads. The solution encapsulates the entire server environment— including data, applications and operating systems—so there is no need to manually rebuild systems from the underlying data before they can be restored. This makes it much quicker to get systems back online in the event of a disaster.
Working with Technical Support services, the internal team completed the installation and backup of all the workloads for the government portal site and extranet within 24 hours. PlateSpin Forge automatically backs up the data on an ongoing basis, which allowed employees to check the integrity of the backups at any time.
“The initial backup of our data was completed in a single night—considering how much data we have, this is very impressive,” said Chen. “As soon as the installation was complete, we tested the solution and found that PlateSpin Forge can restore our systems to their original state in just 15 to 25 minutes following a total crash.”
Regular testing is a central component of a robust disaster recovery plan, and PlateSpin Forge makes it easy.
“Accessing a virtual snapshot view of our recovery workload with a single click means we feel we always have control of the solution,” said Chen. “It is a great advantage to be able to conduct regular analysis of the performance of PlateSpin Forge without affecting user productivity in any way.”
It is a great advantage to be able to conduct regular analysis of the performance of PlateSpin Forge without affecting user productivity in any way.
Results
Since installing PlateSpin Forge, Meizhou Municipal Information Centre has experienced significant reductions in labor and administrative costs, as the OpenText appliance automatically performs scheduled backups without any manual intervention.
“With PlateSpin Forge, we estimate that administration costs have been cut by 80 percent already as our employees are freed up to focus on more profitable work,” said Chen. “We are also able to promise uninterrupted service to our clients as testing the DR capability takes place without affecting performance or availability.”
“The Technical Support team has proved highly reliable, and we feel confident that our data is in good hands,” said Chen. “Technical support is an essential concern to us, as we have limited resources for maintenance; it is great to have help on hand whenever it is needed.”
Above all, the solution has given the employees of the Meizhou Municipal Information Centre peace of mind that in the event of a disaster, they can recover quickly and seamlessly. Said Chen, “In the event of a disaster, we can totally rely on the solution to get the Meizhou municipal government website up and running with no loss of data within half an hour, a huge advantage for both us and our clients.”
With PlateSpin Forge we estimate that administration costs have been cut by 80 percent already.
About Meizhou Municipal Information Centre
Meizhou Municipal Information Centre provides information services to the municipality of Meizhou, China, which has a population of 5.5 million people. The Information Centre is part of the Bureau of Economy and Information and serves 1,000 municipal and county government bodies.
