Association of Teachers and Lecturers

VMWare for Virtualisation - Association of Teachers and Lecturers

"With VMware virtual infrastructure, provisioning new services and changing existing resources dedicated to our software services is extremely manageable. We’ve also been able to increase the continuity of services dramatically by allowing our software to be independent from physical hardware, avoiding the constant developing, updating and testing of expensive disaster recovery plans." -- Ann Raimondo, Head of Information Technology, Association of Teachers and Lecturers - click here to download PDF case study

Goodman Jones

Goodman Jones selects and implements Neverfail with Fitzrovia IT Limited

Technology plays a crucial role in meeting critical deadlines for Goodman Jones, a firm of Chartered Accountants based in central London. Formed in 1934, the 80-person firm offers a broad range of personalised business services, including auditing, tax mitigation, payroll processing and management reporting. The firm prides itself on the quality of service and specialist experience to which clients have access, and is retained by a number of mid-sized enterprises and subsidiaries of international companies across the UK.

The firm’s reliance on IT means it can ill afford downtime, as any outage in its system affects not only its staff’s ability to work, but also could seriously impact both the firm’s reputation and that of its clients. Every month, Goodman Jones processes more than £3 million in salaries for its clients’ staff, making it imperative that its systems are constantly running to ensure accuracy of data and the ability to meet deadlines.

Philip Woodgate, business systems partner at Goodman Jones, was responsible for assessing how the organisation could protect itself against downtime. “We required a system that could protect our internal processes against disaster, but more importantly we needed one that would make sure that information is available to clients and staff whenever they need it. A good example of this is our payroll services: we simply cannot afford to have any problems that would affect our ability to process these payments for clients.”

Goodman Jones previously had a tape back-up system, but required a solution that offered greater flexibility and higher availability of applications, while still being simple to manage. Together with his IT team, Woodgate began evaluating disaster recovery providers such as Double-Take, as well as clustering solutions.

“These systems certainly appeared to work, but they did not offer the benefits of simplicity and ease of management that we demand,” explained Woodgate. “The system that we had in mind needed to be transparent to our users and reduce the level of complexity that we were facing. Ease of management is why we decided to look at Neverfail, and it met our criteria far better than any other product on the market.”

Following a web seminar and a period of research, Woodgate decided on Neverfail to protect the company’s core applications – Exchange (for email), SQL and File Server. Neverfail works by creating a clone of the primary server on a secondary server. This secondary server monitors the performance of the application. If any problems are encountered, Neverfail tries to restart the application before automatically switching over to the secondary server. Users also have their connections and service transferred automatically during this period.

Goodman Jones implemented three application modules to protect its core business critical applications: Neverfail for SQL Server, Neverfail for File Server and Neverfail for Exchange. Each application is hosted across two servers, with the primary server being kept in the company’s data centre. The secondary server for the three applications is situated in a remote hosting centre based in Docklands and is connected to the primary server over a WAN.

In addition, Woodgate opted to install Neverfail’s Low Bandwidth Module to make the best use of the WAN connection. “It was vital to our infrastructure that we could optimise the replicated data that would be going out across the WAN to our secondary servers. The Low Bandwidth Module compresses all this data very efficiently so that we make the best use of our bandwidth,” said Woodgate.

Finally, Goodman Jones also installed the Neverfail Data Rollback Module, which allows organisations to restore their systems to a previous state in the event of data corruption or a replicated virus.. “The ability to return to the previous system set-up was very important to us; this additional security for our information gives us an extra layer of trust,” added Woodgate.

The Neverfail solution has been running in production since September 2005, and during this time, Goodman Jones has been fully protected against incidents of downtime. “Since the installation of Neverfail, we have had continuous access to information and applications,” said Woodgate. “Aside from our planned quarterly test procedures, there have been two particular instances when the system has switched over to run on the secondary server. In both cases, there was no impact on user performance – in fact, the only reason I know that these switchovers have actually taken place was due to the email alerts that I received.”

Goodman Jones continues to rely on Neverfail to support its business, both for its internal processes and to ensure that clients receive the appropriate level of service. “In today’s environment, downtime is simply unacceptable for an accountancy firm like ours,” concluded Woodgate. “Our clients are often working to strict deadlines, and any incident which led to us not being able to fulfil our duties to them would be catastrophic. Using Neverfail, our business is protected against any application issue and our systems work continuously. An issue like email not being available is now a thing of the past.”

Fitzrovia IT implemented NeverFail for Exchange, Neverfail for SQL and Neverfail for File Server during August 2005

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Nathaniel Lichfield and Partners

Nathaniel Lichfield & Partners is an independent town planning consultancy founded in 1962 to provide specialist advice on all aspects of the planning process. Today, Nathaniel Lichfield and Partners is one of the UK’s largest independent firms specialising in development planning with offices in Cardiff, London, Manchester and Newcastle.

NLP’s business continuity strategy was to rely on fault tolerant hardware on all servers; however, this proved ineffective, as the organisation experienced two instances of unplanned downtime in a period of six months. These outages were caused by hardware failure and software corruption, and had a negative impact on business operations; for each day that its main system was down, NLP would risk losing significant billing time.

Therefore, Paul Fuller, Network Infrastructure Manager at NLP approached Daren Oliver of Fitzrovia IT for a business continuity strategy for the firm. Daren recommended Neverfail for Exchange, SQL and File Server in a VMWare VI3 virtualised environment

Following the successful Fitzrovia IT implementation the servers are now fully protected against instances of downtime, ensuring that employees can continue to access business-critical documents regardless of a failure. "Neverfail and VMWare VI3 provides us with all of the protection that we need for our entire server environment. Additionally,  Neverfail Data Rollback Module provides an extra line of defence against corruption and virus attack by allowing us to customise our snapshot schedules and quickly retrieve and restore data in the event of a failover due to data corruption," said Fuller.

"We have experienced significant benefits from deploying Neverfail and VMWare VI3, and the implementation has allowed us to meet key business objectives: to deliver continuous availability of the entire IT environment to our staff, and to ultimately provide a better level of service to our clients," concluded Fuller.

Fitzrovia IT Limited implemeted this system during the early part of 2008.

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Westfield Shoppingtowns

The Westfield Group is the world’s largest listed retail property group by equity market capitalisation. The Group has interests in and operates a global portfolio of 118 high-quality regional shopping centres in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, valued at more than $63 billion. Westfield works with almost 23,000 retailers across more than 10 million square metres of retail space.

Westfield's UK IT Infrastructure Manager, Eric Bradley explains why his firm discussed the Neverfail solution with Fitzrovia IT. "We wanted to ensure that the solution implemented provided disaster recovery and high availablity over a WAN."

Neverfail for Exchange and Neverfail for Blackberry were chosen to protect and maintain email communications. Neverfail for Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry proactively monitors the entire Exchange mail and Blacberry server environment, including server hardware, the network infrastructure, operating systems and the Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry applications.

"Neverfail for Exchange and Neverfail for Blackberry offers us a comprehensive business continuity solution that requires minimal ongoing management from our staff," said Bradley. "Now, we are able to replicate data between our servers in a matter of seconds, ensuring that no data is lost in translation. Whether they know it or not, everyone in our organisation benefits from Neverfail – from our employees having uninterrupted email and Blackberry access to my IT team having peace of mind knowing that business will continue to operate as normal even in the event of a disaster."

The Results