Information is an essential resource for all businesses today and is the key to growth and success. However, companies have to ensure that the information held on their IT systems is secure. 

Kibble IT puts Plan B DR to the test

With a high reliance on IT systems, Kibble IT had an in-house disaster recovery system in place, but outside pressures and customer demand meant that the company decided to look for a third party provider to provide a more resilient data recovery solution.

Kibble IT provides support, maintenance, consultancy and development to clients including Avis Europe and the BBC and the company has to be able to provide a resilient 24/7 service without interrupting service levels in the event of IT downtime.

As the company grew, the cost of managing the in-house disaster recovery system was becoming a drain on resources and it was clear that the in-house system had to be replaced.

Kibble IT turned to Plan B DR, a fully managed disaster recovery service, provide its business continuity needs. In the event of a disaster at Kibble, Plan B DR continues to provide client support services using the recovered systems running on virtual servers at Plan B's data centre (pictured right).

Moving from in-house to hosted 

Kibble IT operations director Nick West said: "We had our own technical solution in place with disaster recovery in an alternative location, but it did not cover all the services we needed and it was hard to maintain. It was hard work although we had automated all the processes.

"Because we provide support services to our clients we needed to be sure that if our resources failed, we had disaster recovery all catered for, giving our clients full confidence at all times."

Plan B DR was selected to provide disaster recovery protection for Kibble's eight servers, covering its core business, email and messaging, file and print, and customer-specific support. In the event of an IT incident, Plan B DR's service ensures a rapid and complete restoration of running systems on its virtual servers.

Dealing with disaster
Incident time line

Monday 12 January 2009
The connections to a piece of Kibble's core architecture drop. Investigations show a server, which is critical for them to provide their support SLA to their customers, has crashed and refuses to reboot
12:41 - Kibble contact Plan B Disaster Recovery and ask for invocation of their service
12:45 - Plan B invoke the recovery process for Kibble's architecture, selecting the server affected by the outage
13:01 - Plan B invocation is complete and Kibble's Technical Contact is called to provide VPN login details for the recovery system
13:12 - Kibble employees can use SSL VPNs to connect to the affected system and continue working

Monday pm
The rebuild was expected to take less than a day, but was more complicated than expected

Tuesday 13 - Wednesday 14 January
Kibble's hardware problems were resolved with on-site replacement parts. The estimated time to rebuild the machine was expected to be less than a day, however, it took nearly three days to complete and test the system

Wednesday 14 January PM
The rescue server was switched off and Kibble's repaired server was brought online

"Plan B is a much improved way of working and it is far cheaper than our old system. The budget was set at what we were already spending; in terms of saving, it was immense," said West. "Financially we have saved a lot of money, but the indirect financial reward was significant the first time we had to invoke the DR as we could continue providing a service to our clients without interruption.

"In the past, if the servers went down it was all hands on deck and we would have been working all night - the DR would have taken a couple of days. The first time our systems failed with Plan B we were able to offer a virtually uninterrupted service with the DR completed in under half an hour."

How it works

Setting up the service is designed to be easy. Plan B DR sent Kibble an intelligent snapshotting appliance that plugs into its network and automatically takes copies of its IT systems - without any need for further IT staff assistance or disruption. The image copies are then sent securely to a Plan B DR data centre, where physical to virtual conversion technology ensures that they run on their virtualised servers.

The newly created system images (rescue images) are automatically tested to guarantee that they will boot up without trouble in the event of a disaster and be available for Kibble within 30 minutes.

The Plan B DR appliance also keeps past snapshots as a local backup and can provide very fast file level recovery - in the event of local data corruption or loss. The Plan B DR local backup feature has the added benefit that as the recovery snapshots are tested every day, Kibble can be certain that the backup files on the appliance are complete and uncorrupted.

Plan B pricing is based on a per server cost, starting from £180 per server per month.

Plan B DR's service was put to the test by Kibble when they requested the recovery of a critical server that had crashed and would not reboot (see box).

Benefits

By using the Plan B DR services, Kibble avoided a potentially damaging impact on its business. The company experienced perfect business continuity - even though its critical server was out of action for three days. Kibble is now confident that, in the event of a disaster, its business will continue to run smoothly.

West added: "Using the Plan B Disaster Recovery service gave us the security that while an open ended problem was being resolved, we were able to carry on business with almost no interruption. This was just as well given the time it took to repair our server. Our migration back to our live service was planned and unhurried at a time convenient to our customers and in the knowledge that if something went wrong our business would not be affected."

http://www.planbdr.co.uk/
http://www.kibbleit.co.uk