Case Studies
Get real-life stories on how our customers are using Double-Take Software products in their evolving dynamic infrastructure for disaster recovery, business continuity, migration and more.
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Current Case Studies Infinis Case Study
Project Summary: Renewable energy company Infinis needed to protect its critical applications in real time. The company chose Double-Take Availability for its data replication capabilities, ensuring that information is protected as it is created. Infinis is one of the largest renewable energy companies in the UK, providing more than eight per cent of the country’s total renewable energy. With more than eighty sites across the UK, the company has developed a portfolio of renewable energy sites, producing energy from landfill gas and wind.
The Swiss Government Federal Department of Justice and Police is using managed virtual desktops across 200 sites worldwide, including embassies, airports and police stations. Double-Take® Flex offers a simple way to provision secure and controlled desktops to users in each location, which service provider ISC can then manage centrally.
With offices distributed across the UK, The Apollo Group’s employees use the company’s IT systems to collaborate on projects both large and small. Access to information and files is critical to the successful delivery of projects, therefore these systems must be available at all times. To protect these applications and data, and to ensure fast recovery in the event of a failure, a full business continuity strategy was required. Canopius is an insurance and reinsurance company based within Lloyd’s of London. The company has grown its financial resources to over £400million, and Canopius Managing Agents is the largest privately-held managing agent within Lloyd’s. As part of its growth strategy, Canopius has expanded its business both by acquisition and by organic development. However, the increase of business-to-business communications across the Internet meant that the company had to re-evaluate its IT strategy for the future, including how it approached business continuity. The company’s charges for data vaulting had gone up considerably as data volumes expanded. This level of cost pushed Canopius into considering new storage options. Cavendish Maine’s Bristol office supports a network of remote users all of whom rely on the central network and email services as a critical source of information and means of communication. Should users be unable to log on to the network and access the database that holds client and candidate information, they would be unable to perform their work. In addition, loss of the email service would seriously impact their ability to provide the level of service expected by their clients. Read how Cavendish Maine protects their critical domain controller and email servers with Double-Take® Software. Rouse is a leading global intellectual property (IP) consultancy and law firm. Established in 1990, the company now has more than 550 employees, including lawyers, patent and trade mark attorneys and specialist IP investigators, working in 20 offices around the world. The company provides a range of IP services, from registration to commercialisation and enforcement. Long-standing clients include many of the world’s foremost IP owners such as GlaxoSmithKline, Harley-Davidson, Google, adidas, Sony Ericsson and BP plc.
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Providing customers with the service they expect means having access to information as it is required. When you are dealing with sensitive citizen data, this need for protection only gets stronger. Staff at the various departments across Derbyshire Country Council are responsible for handling inquiries and transactions across a wide variety of fields, from social services and employment support through to education and public safety decision-making. In the competitive, fast-paced world of financial services, the ability to offer quality service is a crucial differentiator. An organisation’s IT infrastructure is key to ensuring that employees have the right information and applications available to them, allowing them to deliver on client requirements. The Matrix Group is no exception – with operations across investment banking, hedge fund management and project finance, IT plays a vital role in how the company services its customers. After going through the solutions available Matrix IT chose Double-Take® Software to provide the core replication platform at the heart of their new DR strategy.
Premier is one of the largest privately held fund management companies in the UK, providing clients with a range of services around funds, investment trusts and portfolio management. The company had to invest heavily in new servers and applications to support its business after a rapid expansion in staff. This represented a challenge for the company’s IT team, as any incident of downtime would affect Premier’s ability to serve customers.
After comparing data replication solutions Premier selected Double-Take to implement a Full Server Fail-over approach for its remote site. Overall, Premier now has ten servers protected using Double-Take, covering applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2003, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Citrix and the company’s file servers are also protected using Double-Take. Workload Portability ~ Physical to Virtual Migration with VMware Infrastructure: Fernando Zangrande noted, "We are very satisfied with Double-Take Software for the simple fact that although we evaluated other software, no other software was as simple as Double-Take. Their workload portability solution for migrations was easy, cost-effective and the best solution out there." International law firm Bird & Bird aims to provide a unique service based on an extensive knowledge of key industry sectors and legal practice. The London office supports over 250 lawyers all of whom rely on email as a critical means of communication with clients and others. For these individuals, any outage of the email service would have a serious impact on their ability to provide the high quality work and level of service that their clients expect. Whilst the firm employs a clustered Exchange system and a reliable storage platform to support its staff and maintain availability of email, there was still a risk that a full site failure would lead to messages not being received and service being affected. The firm therefore decided as part of the business continuity planning to evaluate and review replication tools to provide an additional level of protection. Leading the field in online assessment for vocational qualifications, Learning Assistant has enabled thousands of learners to get qualified since 2002. Over the last two years, the company has experienced faster than projected growth, thanks partly to a number of innovations made by their software development team. What Learning Assistant needed was the most resilient and scalable system they could find, which took up the least amount of physical space, used the least amount of power, and of course, still be the most cost effective solution. Finally, the system had to pretty much run itself, and be manageable by in-house staff. Working with a DR consultant, the City of Airdrie looked at several DR products to meet their needs. One of the key requirements was real-time data replication and failover for remote availability. Once they evaluated the Double-Take® Software suite of products, it was an easy decision for the DR team. "Double-Take was a great fit for our organisation because it provided all of the required capabilities for remote availability in one product," said Paul Hurst, Network Administrator, City of Airdrie. "Due to its flexibility, real-time data replication, and automatic failover, Double-Take was the solution of choice to complement our backup and restore strategy." Until now only large enterprises could afford to replicate their software and data files in real time to a secure remote recovery site. Unicorn IT, a leading provider of managed IT solutions for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), teamed up with Double-Take software, the leader in real time replication software, to provide an enterprise-level, yet affordable, business continuity service to SMBs which does just that. The devil is in the details and time is money—two sayings that could not be more true than in the legal industry. This case study presents how Kilpatrick Stockton tackled one of the toughest challenges related to data management. The challenge was to find and implement a data protection solution that facilitates attorneys’ access to vital business email records without having to load backup tapes or wade through over three terabytes of historical email data. To put it simply: They needed the ability to find the needle in a haystack. 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. View the Video Case StudyReal 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. Local high availability: Scan Alarms & Security Systems, one of the largest privately owned electronic security companies in Northern Ireland, realised 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. 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 organisations 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 minimising downtime) is an essential part of their overall disaster recovery plan. MWABank wanted to leverage the benefits of virtualisation 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. The LSNY programs and projects began during the War on Poverty of the 1960's. Now, LSNY is the largest provider of civil legal services to low-income persons in the United States. Each year, LSNY's programs serve thousands of low-income clients throughout New York City in the full range of their legal needs. Their challenge was to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster; and to centralise information, applications and IT administration across a decentralised organisation. 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 minimise 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. Northcliffe Newspapers Group Ltd is one of the largest and most successful regional newspaper publishers in the UK. Established in 1928, Northcliffe is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Daily Mail & General Trust and produces more than 9 million newspapers in an average week. For many years Northcliffe have been successfully using PC server technology for the production of publications. Resilience and uptime had been managed by using a combination of RAID technology and redundant servers that could be brought on line relatively quickly. For two key reasons their existing strategy was not going to be good enough to meet the future requirements. Read their story today. Kainos is an eBusiness and customer relationship management specialist with a 15 year track record in providing leading edge technology solutions for customers in the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Utilities and Retail sectors. Kainos wanted to address the problem of replicating data between Windows based systems for the purposes of disaster recovery, and resiliency in a number of different ways. Allied Bakeries manufactures leading brands Kingsmill, Allinson, Sunblest and Burgen, and has approximately a third share of the bread market in the UK. Being in the fast consumer goods business means that all orders are handled and dispatched daily through an electronic processing system, which must remain up and running 24 hours a day.In order to mitigate the risk of a breakdown in the order processing system, it was decided to seek a robust backup data replication process to ensure that a viable contingency operation could spring into action in the event of a system failure. Access to data is vital for any company, whether it is Exchange, SQL or just file data, without it most companies are unable to operate efficiently – this can lead to lost revenues and infuriated customers. Cofathec Heatsave is a leading provider of integrated energy and facilities solutions in the UK. The IT director at Cofathec Heatsave, tasked Insite with providing a business continuity solution that would provide comprehensive protection against two key scenarios: an environmental failure of the computer room at the head office in London and also a single application or business critical server failure. 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) recognised 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 centred around Double-Take.
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