Case Studies from Double-Take Software

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More than 12,000 customers worldwide trust Double-Take Software to safeguard their hard work. Reams of success stories mean we're doing something right. Here are just a few...

Endocare
“We chose VMware Server and Double-Take because the solution allowed us to take realtime snapshots of the individual vmdk files and replicate them to another server for disaster recovery,” said David Avnaim, Director of IT at Endocare. “Doing so gives us the real-time data protection we were looking for (at a reasonable cost) as well as a quick and easy recovery process if another disaster should occur.” Read the full story to learn more.

Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP
Sonnenschein is a full-service, international law firm. This case study outlines the customer need for a comprehensive business continuity plan with a focus on uptime using co-location facilities. It details 3 specific projects including a centralized messaging system, Double-Take for Exchange, and a complete data center migration. This case study describes how Sonnenschein is protecting Exchange Server 2003, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, OpenText, Elite, PeopleSoft, Windows File Sharing and multiple custom applications all with Double-Take.

Chickasaw Nation
Chickasaw Nation must keep their data within their sovereign realm and therefore the Nation has its own disaster recovery (DR) data center in Norman, Oklahoma. Currently, they use GeoCluster to replicate their financial systems to the DR site and Double-Take to replicate the HR/Payroll system. They test their DR plan semi-annually and have successfully tested the financial systems without a problem and zero data loss. It takes less than 5 minutes to fail from the primary cluster in Ada to the DR server in Norman. They are also able to fail back their primary cluster with zero data loss.

Jesuit Tampa High School
Seamless Full-Server Failover: Jesuit is a comprehensive preparatory high school that requires 24x7 access to critical data and online learning applications. In their environment today, Jesuit Tampa has licenses for Double Take on their Microsoft Exchange server which doubles as the main file server for 700+ users. Most recently, Jesuit Tampa added Double-Take with full server failover to their Oracle database server. The Full-Server Failover feature applies the source server’s OS configuration, applications, and data to the target server. This was important because it drastically reduces the complexity of setting up a standby system for failover and reduces the costs and complexity of managing that environment.

Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa
Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa chose Double-Take Software for its flexibility in different architectures, seamless failover process, and the company’s solid relationship with VMware. Using Double-Take, Borgata is able to create cost-effective disaster recovery architectures, provide 24x7 application availability, and follow their daily contingency plan.

Carlsberg Group
Carlsberg’s Leeds operation is one of the company’s two major breweries in the UK. With supplies of ‘probably the best lager in the world’ at stake, Carlsberg couldn’t afford to leave their business continuity plans to chance. By implementing the Double-Take solution at their Leeds brewery, Carlsberg now has total confidence that their brewing processes will not be interrupted by IT failures, which in turn delivers assurance of continuity of supply to retailers and the nation’s beer drinkers.

Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
Disaster Recovery and Failover with Whole Server Recovery: Osler, a leading Canadian law firm, realized the vulnerability associated with tape backup and wanted to implement a disaster recovery solution that would protect their business continuity operations, protect critical client data and help eliminate human error if downtime occurred. After reviewing four software packages as well as exploring different ways to move data, they looked to Double-Take Software for real-time replication and whole server recovery. Given that this was a critical endeavor for Osler, Double-Take Software’s impressive customer service and support team were major factors in the decision.

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Failover and Protection for Exchange and BES: NCMEC is unique for many reasons, one being a 24-hour, toll-free Hotline for the recovery of missing children in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice. When a child goes missing, 24x7 action is crucial and the availability of business-critical applications is vital to that process. Like many organizations today, NCMEC’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) is one of those critical applications. Their BES allows for constant communication and information sharing when looking for a missing child. Therefore, uptime (or minimizing downtime) is an essential part of their overall disaster recovery plan.

MWABank
MWABank wanted to leverage the benefits of virtualization while providing a true disaster recovery plan with real-time data protection, high availability and recovery. After reviewing several products, MWABank decided that the combination of Dell’s hardware, VMware’s virtual machines and Double-Take Software’s replication technology was a no-brainer.Read their story today.

Tannenbaum Helpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt LLP
Tannenbaum Helpern, a Double-Take Software customer since 2003, uses Double-Take for disaster recovery and most recently purchased Double-Take Server Recovery Option (SRO) to perform a physical to virtual server migration. They leveraged the flexibility of Double-Take SRO to consolidate their environment by removing several outdated servers and putting the old systems onto VMware ESX virtual machines. Read their story today.

Baxter Credit Union (BCU)
Like many organizations prior to working with Double-Take® Software, BCU relied on tape backups for disaster recovery. Yet, while tape backup is a good tool for archiving, the IT team at BCU know that a true disaster recovery plan would require an easier recovery process, failover and strict RPO/RTO objectives. Today, BCU protects their physical and virtual environments with a strategically architected solution that combines Double-Take and Double-Take Server Recovery Option (SRO). Read their story today.

McWilliams Forge
Reliable, fast recovery with failover: Like many organizations prior to joining the Double-Take® Software family, McWilliams Forge relied heavily on tape backup for business continuity. The catalyst for finding a better way to protect and recover their data came after having a severe production server crash. To recover, the McWilliams Forge team spent more than 40 hours rebuilding the system and though it worked, the recovery process was incredibly expensive, time consuming, and challenging for the team. As a result, McWilliams Forge recognized the need to provide an enhanced DR solution as well as 24x7 application availability for business continuity. Learn why they chose Double-Take Software.

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Hatch Mott MacDonald
Disaster Recovery: When Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast in September 2005 the Mobile, Alabama office was forced to close for a week, and Hatch Mott MacDonald (HMM) was ready. HMM worked with Dell and Double-Take Software to create a plan and build a solution to meet their needs by using Double-Take. The plan was resilient at many different levels and centered around the creation of a secure centralized backup facility that would house replicated data from all of the company's North American offices.

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S.H. Smith & Company
Real-time data protection and recovery: Prior to working with Double-Take® Software and VMware, S.H. Smith & Company did not have a solid disaster recovery plan. Without an updated disaster recovery plan in place, an outage could potentially have a major impact on their business. With the need for an enhanced disaster recovery plan to ensure business continuity, S.H Smith & Company looked to Double-Take Software and VMware for a reliable solution.

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Scan Alarms & Security Systems (UK) Ltd.
Local high availability: Scan Alarms & Security Systems, one of the largest privately owned electronic security companies in Northern Ireland, realized the need for local high availability when their aging RAID controller failed, causing Scan to be without important customer data for nearly three days. Shortly thereafter, Scan purchased Double-Take for fail-proof business continuity. Read their story.

Multimedia International Services
Real time data protection and failover: Multimedia International Services operates the UK’s largest electronic point of purchase advertising network. With installations in many UK Post Offices, private hospitals and leisure facilities, the company helps up to 18,000 local businesses advertise on highly visible digital screens in a range of busy locations. After a SAN corruption kept them out of business for four days, Multimedia International Services knew they needed to eliminate the single points of failure within their IT infrastructure. After trying to do this unsuccessfully for seven months with a competitor’s product, they selected Double-Take Software and successfully implemented in a day and a half. They now protect Exchange, database, web, reporting, content management, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) with Double-Take.

Brookfield Asset Management
Remote failover with strict RPO and RTO objectives: Implementing Double-Take has allowed Brookfield to streamline their disaster recovery and business continuity exercises. Double-Take dramatically reduces the effort involved in recovering if an outage should occur and has given the team confidence that they will be able to minimize downtime and application interruption if something should happen. “Double-Take was able to meet our strict RTO and RPO objectives at a very low cost,” said Stephane Deschenes, Director of IS at Brookfield. Read the full case study today.

McVey & Murricane
Business Continuity: With a varied and increasing workload, further complicated by compliance obligations placed on the firm by its work with larger ‘corporate’ clients, McVey & Murricane (M&M) recognized the need for a more resilient IT infrastructure. M&M selected Xpedient Business Solutions as its preferred consultant and worked with them to develop and implement an innovative and cost-effective solution centered around Double-Take.

Renasant Bank
Comprehensive Disaster Recovery: Instead of relying entirely on the daily rotation of tapes that left Renasant Bank vulnerable to human error, they wanted to enhance their tape backup strategy with a real-time data replication solution. Dell engineers recommended Double-Take from Double-Take Software to meet their needs.

KPMG
Centralized Backup: With 11 sites set out among the major French cities, KPMG Audit, the leading French auditing firm, had to deal with a time-consuming and tedious backup process. Today, a centralized backup solution powered by Double-Take allows for a smaller number of servers making the backups easier to manage. Double-Take also provides a more reliable recovery process.

Charter Institute of Bankers in Scotland
Disaster Recovery: As more organizations rely on IT systems to support vital business processes and maintain essential data, the quality of services delivered to customers, members or shareholders can only ever be as good as the overarching infrastructure used to support the business process itself. Double-Take is now used between their two Scottish offices to support their disaster recovery plan.

SportsDirect, Inc.
Failover Success with Clusters: SportsDirect, Inc. has been creating the sports content that people love since 1995 and with over 300 million page views a year, continuous product support and service development, SportsDirect leads the online sports information industry. SportsDirect ultimately chose GeoCluster because it provided both real-time replication with an excellent RPO, seamless integration with MSCS and the ability to execute hands-free failover from active nodes to the passive nodes in the event of an outage. Read the full case study today.

Arapahoe House
Data Compliance: Arapahoe House, featured in Health Management Technology, is Colorado’s largest nonprofit, community-based rehabilitation and detoxification center. They required a cost-effective solution to help streamline their operations, meet new HIPAA regulations, and keep their business highly available. They chose Double-Take because it provided a many-to-one failover and also offered other synchronization and replication capabilities that the organization wanted.

Newfoundland Power
Sharepoint, SQL, and Exchange Protection: Newfoundland Power relies 24x7 on file and print services, Exchange Server, their corporate website, Microsoft SharePoint and a host of other Oracle and SQL Server based applications. As such, sound business continuity and disaster recovery plans are an integral part of their overall data protection strategy. Read the case study to learn why they chose Double-Take Software to streamline their disaster recovery and business continuity exercises.

Delaware Department of Education
Disaster Recovery: Ron Miller of eWeek wrote this case study titled "Recovery System Gets High Marks" after speaking to Bob Czeizinger at the Delaware Department of Education about Double-Take Software. After experiencing a catastrophic database server failure several years ago, Cziezinger looked to Double-Take to keep his systems running, regardless of hardware of software issues.

Mack Energy
Real-Time Data Protection: Even though continuous access to data is not an absolute necessity at Mack Energy, the company realizes the importance of protecting its data and having a backup plan in place should a disaster strike. Mack Energy has IBM ~®xSeries® 346, xSeries 360 and xSeries 230 servers running Microsoft® Exchange and SQL in addition to data file storage. It was a natural extension for Mack Energy to turn to IBM to solve their SAN needs for disaster recovery. After consulting with IBM and receiving a recommendation of Double-Take Software®, Mack Energy determined they had found the right solution for the real-time replication of its data.

Suffolk University
24x7 Access and High Availability: When Suffolk University made the strategic decision to establish a new online learning presence, data protection and application availability became essential. With thousands of students using their new, online services model each day, a system failure that prohibited access to online data and services, would stifle the education of thousands of students from around the globe. To meet their needs, Suffolk selected Double-Take®.

Tribune
Exchange Protection: Tribune is a major source of news throughout the country. Its main business is information, which makes internal messaging an important piece of day-to-day operations. To make its messaging system easier to manage, the company decided to migrate all of its 22,000 users to Microsoft Exchange 2003. After migrating, an outage of any kind would affect a lot of people. Not only would the 22,000 users at Tribune potentially loose email, but it could also affect the loyal viewers and readership that depend upon Tribune as a source for up-to-the-minute news. Tribune sought distance-based protection through its IT integrator and through Dell. Both recommended Double-Take®.

MassHousing
Virtualization and Business Continuity: MassHousing had two fundamental challenges - 24x7 data access and support for a highly-complex IT infrastructure that includes SQL, Progress, Pervasive and Exchange, as well as a virtual environment featuring products from VMware. In the event of a system failure that prohibited access to data, MassHousing would not be able to provide any customer service, would be unable to transfer funds or share data with banks and would paralyze its own staff from completing its day-to-day work. In other words, data loss would necessitate a virtual shut-down of operations. To avert this, MassHousing selected Double-Take.

Baker & McKenzie
High Availability with Failover: Baker & McKenzie required a solution that would meet their RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective). As a leading law firm dealing with strict deadlines and serving thousands of clients, they had almost no room for downtime or lost data. They considered products from multiple providers, but were not pleased with the high cost of entry and the limited availability features. Then, through a recommendation from one of their key hardware providers, they found what they were looking in Double-Take.

LSNY
Centralized Backup: Learn how LSNY uses Double-Take and GeoCluster to ensure business continuity and data protection in the event of a disaster and to centralize information, applications and IT administration across a decentralized organization.

The Boston Celtics
Centralized Disaster Recovery: To protect critical data and to keep the organization functioning at a competitive level, the Celtics needed a streamlined data environment that would ensure 24/7: reliability, centralized administration , real-time recovery and centralized disaster recovery. The Celtics considered solutions from XOSoft and SteelEye, but when Microsoft recommended Double-Take, the choice seemed clear.

Shorenstein Company LLC
Remote Data Protection for Business Continuity: After speaking with many vendors including SteelEye, Comdisco, and Veritas, Shorenstein Company LLC made the decision to install Double Take®. Double-Take allowed Shorenstein to create a remote site where data and applications could be continually replicated from 15 remote servers to ensure business continuity.

Banner & Witcoff, Ltd.
Disaster Recovery with Failover: Banner & Witcoff, a leading intellectual property law firm, wanted a quick and easy data protection and data recovery plan that also enabled systems failover at any or all of four regional offices from a remote location in the event of a disaster. Double-Take got the job done.

LAgraphico
Exchange Protection: LAgraphico, a leading creative imaging company that services Hollywood's elite, like 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks and Universal Pictures selected GeoCluster to protect its missions-critical Exchange Servers. According to Mark Squire, IT Systems Administrator at LAgraphico, "Right from the start, GeoCluster was a slam dunk."

International Imaging Materials, Inc
High Availability: In March 2004 International Imaging Materials, Inc. (IIMAK) lost access to its customer order and fulfillment database server. This prompted the company to search for a high-availability solution so the server could fail over to a backup server in case of another failure. IIMAK turned to GeoCluster for the answer.

Hershey Entertainment and Resorts
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Hershey Entertainment & Resorts Company is using Double-Take as part of a centralized approach to disaster recovery and business continuity. Centralized backup and high availability of business-critical data using Double-Take software is an important element of Hershey Entertainment & Resorts Company's business continuity plan and is critical to protecting the integrity of their business - a positive guest experience.

Covanta Energy Corporation
Real-Time Data Protection: Covanta faced a number of issues in their technology upgrades. Tape back-up systems threatened to cost over $120,000 for the company's thirty U.S. sites. Bandwidth issues exacerbated the problem: some of the company's facilities rely on dial up connections and have 512K shared bandwidth. Covanta needed a data protection solution that would make efficient use of scarce resources. They selected Double-Take.

Abbey Press
Complete Business Continuity: Abbey Press, a well-known provider of religious and inspirational goods, is a significant revenue producer for the Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana. The Abbey Press web site is responsible for a steadily increasing portion of that revenue. With the promise of continued growth ahead, Abbey Press chose GeoCluster Plus to assure business continuity.

DraftWorldWide
Real-Time Data Protection: Microsoft and Double-Take Software are providing DraftWorldwide with a high performance storage solution. The combination of Windows Powered NAS devices with Double-Take replication technology was easy to deploy and offers a cost-effective, fault-tolerant, many-to-one solution. Real-time backup and automatic failover capabilities are virtually eliminating downtime and data loss for DraftWorldwide, ensuring availability and reliability for 24x7 business operations.

MidAmerica Bank
Centralized Backup with True ROI: When relying on tape back-up alone, MidAmerica Bank had to allow about an hour per branch for weekly technical maintenance and verification. With thirty-four branches, the support was roughly equal to the cost of a full time employee. Adding Double-Take to the equation eliminated that expense, and that's only the start of the savings.

Accessor Capital Management
Data Compliance and Disaster Recovery: Accessor Capital Management has a reputation for strategic use of technology and exceptional support services for investors. Consistent with that distinction, Accessor assures the safety and integrity of its data by turning to Double-Take.

EMBARK.COM
High Availability: EMBARK.COM is an Internet pioneer, providing thousands of students, teachers, counselors and parents with up-to-date information on college, graduate and law school. Students can not only research schools on the site, but also apply for admission directly on the site. School counselors are linked to EMBARK.COM to access these applications, field questions and to provide advice. Also online are college and law school entrance exam test preparations.

Ashford.com
Internet commerce sites must always be up and available to customers. Even more importantly, the customers' orders and data must be protected and secure. Ashford.com, the leading Internet retailer of luxury and premium accessories, knows about precious commodities. That's why the company keeps their data safe and secure with Double-Take.

Kern County Sheriff's Department
Police departments all over the U.S. are turning to information technology to make them more efficient and productive. One of the most time-consuming and space-choking aspects of police paper work is the filing and retrieval of arrest records. Because the safety and protection of these records is vital, Kern County Sheriff's Department uses Double-Take for high availability.

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