Providing For Proven and Tested Disaster Recovery

The Challenge

A large provider of a broad range of financial services had been without a viable disaster recovery (DR) capability for over a decade.  Its two data centers ran in very close proximity, such that a regional event would expose both facilities.  Their long-term plan was for east and west coast data centers, but, running a pair of CECs, determined that a single production infrastructure would be more cost-effective.

They decided to relocate the smaller of the two datacenters from the company headquarters to a modern DC in the Ashburn corridor, thereby avoiding the investment to upgrade the data center and to take advantage of the telco interconnects there for its growing presence in the cloud.

Having already seen GTSG’s expertise in consolidations based on our managed services contract, our client reached out for help.

Our Approach

The client’s DR plan was outdated, and the timeline to stand up colocation was unreasonably compressed.  The timeline compression was compounded by their expectation of the new DC workflow: the client had previously operated its own data centers, had never worked with colocation providers and therefore didn’t understand the structure and timing of the service request workflow.

We immediately began a sub-project to consolidate the technology in advance of the DR standup, so that opportunities for change were leveraged as the data center consolidation occurred.

Once we consolidated the 2 CECs into one, we:

  • Stood up a brand new environment in Ashburn (Equal capacity CBU box, Global Mirrored DASD, and a VTS in a two-node grid with HQ)
  • Defined an Isolated Network which enabled concurrent DR testing without impact to Production system and to be leveraged for application-level testing if required

…all while building a DR plan.  The projects finished concurrently, and the client tested DR successfully twice, four months apart.

The Outcome

  • Achieved out of region recoverability for the first time
  • Achieved an on-time/on-budget project
  • Bottom line: The client was thrilled.
    • this was the latest in an unbroken string of successes beginning with a successful transition in which the outgoing provider refused to participate
    • the client remains a reference