Groupe Agrica selects Double-Take® to guarantee virtual server availability
The French Groupe Agrica manages state-mandated social security schemes (retirement, injury, health care and savings plans) for employees in the agricultural sector. It covers over 818 000 pensioners and 1.4 million active employees from 156 000 enterprises. In 2006 the group had a turnover of €2.1 billion.
The needs
With an infrastructure based on VMware ESX 3.5 and hardware from HP, Agrica has identified some twenty virtual servers (Windows and Linux) as business critical. Initially Agrica is prioritizing deployment on the most critical servers and those with the longest tape restoration times, such as their Oracle servers. Ultimately, the objective is optimize the full infrastructure, covering around 50 servers in total.
The solution: Double-Take® for VMware™ Infrastructure
Groupe Agrica was already using Double-Take Software solutions to synchronize their file servers, so there was no hesitation when it came to business continuity. “The solution does exactly what we need, without requiring us to deploy third party management or reporting tools” according to system architects Julien Mousqueton and Frédéric Bathieux of the group's Information Systems Department. “We really liked Double-Take's in-depth support for VMware's “snapshots” feature. Snapshots are extremely useful but difficult to manage and up to now we needed to develop scripts to handle this. The Double-Take solution manages snapshots automatically, saving time and improving reliability.”
Benefits
Agrica's virtual servers are now synchronized with the remote backup site in real time, despite the bandwidth limitations of the network connection. “This was one of the deciding factors. We only have 8 Mbit/s on the WAN, and we need to reserve at least 3 Mbit/s during daytime working hours for normal productivity. The Double-Take solution uses data compression, optimizing the bandwidth needed for server synchronization.”
Business Continuity
“Another key feature for us is that if disaster hits, bringing up the backup servers is practically instantaneous. All we need to do is modify an IP address.” Fallback is also supported; “We can automatically switch back from a backup server to a production server, without needing to manually rebuild the environment” say the system architects.
Crowning it all...
is the budget. Compared with other virtual server disaster recovery solutions, the Double-Take solution is particularly cost effective. According to Agrica, the cost is around €500 per virtual server.
To know more about Double-Take in a VMware environment
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Datacenter 2.0 is on the move
For vendors such as Cisco, Microsoft, F5 or Infoblox, Dynamic Infrastructure is the biggest revolution in networking since TCP/IP. Or so they say. Infoblox Senior Director Greg Ness knows what he’s talking about, and he’s just talked about this very subject on his personal blog. According to Ness, the Dynamic Infrastructure will release new potential in networks based on smart connectivity and dynamic links, automation, cloud computing and virtualisation. Vendors are piling in. Cisco has linked up with VMware to deliver the Nexus 1000V switch, automating the network response to datacenter virtual server operations and modifications. Infoblox offers appliances that automate key network services such as DNS, DHCP/IPAM, RADIUS, and FTP/TFTP/HTTP servers, with a virtual appliance designed to run on the Riverbed RiOS platform, streamlining remote office deployments. Double-Take Software’s Dynamic Infrastructure initiatives include netBoot/i™ and sanFly™. Combined with continuous replication to a remote site, sanFly has a key role to play in the Dynamic Infrastructure vision as it facilitates server migration between physical and virtual machines with iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage. Double-Take also delivers cost-effective zero-downtime server load migration. All in all, the very essence of a dynamic infrastructure.
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