Sensitive Data Protection

With significant volumes of sensitive data to protect, the department wanted a low-maintenance disaster recovery solution that would offer full protection and rapid recovery.

The NetIQ Solution

The IT team at this governmental department worked with its business partner Ounet Sistemi to deploy a PlateSpin Forge disaster recovery appliance. Ounet Sistemi showcased the highly advanced features of the solution, and the company now provides ongoing technical support.

“We were confident that the NetIQ solution would meet our requirements and satisfy our business needs, enabling us to guarantee high availability and security for key systems,” said the IT Manager at this governmental department.

The department is using PlateSpin Forge to maintain virtual mirror copies of 10 key servers. In the event of a failure of one or more physical servers, users can be rapidly switched over to the virtual copy on the PlateSpin Forge appliance. The appliance also handles crucial virtual-to-physical conversion, making it able to seamlessly move the server back to the original hardware when repaired or to completely
new hardware if a replacement is required.

“PlateSpin Forge is perfectly compatible with our different operating systems,”said the IT Manager. “The workflow is very transparent, as well as the solution itself, and it gives us greater visibility into our available resources.”

PlateSpin Forge enables simulated disaster recovery tests to run quickly, easily and with zero disruption to live users, reinforcing confidence that systems are protected in the appropriate way at all times.

Fast and accurate

The NetIQ solution allows the department to guarantee a seamless and reliable service to its 370 external users in the event of a disaster. The recovery time objective has decreased by about 97 percent—systems can now be restored in only two hours, a sharp reduction from the three to four days it took using the previous approach.

The benefits of using PlateSpin Forge were proven when the department recently experienced a system failure. “Two of our RAM banks crashed, and we had to immediately shut down the physical environment, replace it with new one, change all the IP addresses and relaunch the machines,” said the IT Manager. “In less than two hours, we were able to restart the memory banks, and restore everything from the virtual copy on PlateSpin Forge. In the past, it would have taken us up to four full days to perform the same task. Although the target hardware had changed when we failed back over from PlateSpin Forge, there were no compatibility issues, because the PlateSpin solution automatically handles the conversion from virtual back to physical.”

Universal strategy

The use of PlateSpin Forge has been extended to all applications and databases that this governmental department manages. “We store confidential data that needs to be available to our users at all times,” said the IT Manager. “It would not be feasible to rebuild it manually in the event of a failure. With PlateSpin Forge this process is completely automated and can be achieved in a very short time, ensuring vital data is kept fully protected at all times.”

“Another useful feature of PlateSpin Forge is the ability to manage servers remotely,” said the IT Manager. “If, for example, a server crashes, we can easily manage the restart from a mobile device such as an iPad. We can also failover to the backup servers remotely, which guarantees fast system recovery.”

The IT team is extremely satisfied with PlateSpin Forge. “We now feel confident that we can provide an uninterrupted, secure service,” said the IT Manager. “Server or component failures no longer translate into disruption to our daily operations, because PlateSpin Forge ensures data redundancy and high availability, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

After seeing the benefits of the solution, the department is planning to purchase the extended edition of PlateSpin Forge, enabling expansion of its protection to 15 additional servers.