Case Study - Major Health Products Manufacture
The Problem
The Client was looking to automate the Server Provisioning and Management stack for both Windows and Linux Servers. The time spent on manual tasks to manage the estate of Windows & Linux Servers was becoming to costly, and a new automated approach was desired to increase efficiency, security, and allowing to scale to better serve its clients and internal users.
The Solution
In April of 2016, FyrSoft began initial steps to protect Clients Production Virtual Machines for the company’s systems. The hypervisor management layer was comprised of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2. Once the VMs were protected, FyrSoft started on the pre- and post configuration to fail up to Azure Site Recovery. While building ASR, it became apparent that client needed a recovery plan that included manual steps for applications that were not built for High Availability. FyrSoft Senior Consultant, Jim Gowler, developed, documented and delivered a step-by-step guide to assist in regaining business continuity in the event of a disaster. “We relied heavily on Jim to come up with the DR plan. I’m sure if I had to set it up myself, I could have figured out how to replicate it, but coming up with the plan would have been very difficult. The playbook we received allows us to say ‘ok, it’s down, here’s what we need to get the business going again’. It’s a tested, proven, step by step guide,” said Lerner. “When implementing a business continuity plan, it is not only moving the data or virtual machines to a Disaster Recovery Site (DRS) but making sure the applications and services run and the client has access to the recovered data and Virtual machines,” said Gowler. “With most applications not built as Highly Available (HA), simply recovering the data and virtual machines doesn’t ensure that users have access to the running applications and services.
The key feature of Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is the Recovery Plan using Azure Automation. This allows us to do any post configurations of the applications and services to make them available to the clients.” After the ASR solution was built, FyrSoft validated using Test Failover in an isolated test network. The objective was to ensure all transactions were recorded in Azure Site Recovery in the cloud in the event internal systems went down. Once demonstrated, ASR and the recovery plan was revisited using additional Azure Automation and the core manual steps were then automated. The final test demonstrated the ERP system brought online in Azure using Azure Site Recovery in less than 66 minutes with the ability to connect over the internet or through VPN connections, fully
