Mining Service Provider, Australia

This company provides health, safety, and rescue services to Australia's mining industry and is subject to Commonwealth's Corporations Act 2001 regulations. As such, they are required by their Board to have a business continuity plan in place and must undergo frequent audits.

The company conducted daily tape backups to its existing disaster recovery (DR) site, but it was not as reliable as desired and became unwieldy as data grew.

The company looked at two alternatives. The first involved a complete replacement of their two storage vendors, implementation of new virtualized servers and a replicated SAN, and VMware clustered servers in both production and DR, with VMware SRM for DR. The cost was ~$600K (U.S.) and would take 3-6 months to implement with significant disruption to the environment.

Instead, the company chose to go with the second alternative, which involved two pairs of onQ appliances running 27 production servers in a DR environment and providing complete site recovery in the event of a failure. The cost for this solution was ~$125K (U.S.) and was implemented in one week.

• Achieved complete business continuity at 1/5 the cost and in 1/12 the time it would have taken with alternative solution.
• Easily perform regular self-tests to prove regulatory compliance.
• Improved data protection reliability and recovery time.