Product category:
Backup and Disaster recover
News Release from: Topio | Subject: TDPS
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 10 March 2006
The Imagine Group Protects with Topio
The Image Group are delighted with the solution that Topio and Taurus have implemented for us. We now know that all our data around the world is safe
The Imagine Group, a specialist reinsurance writer, offers its worldwide customers a variety of products from property-casualty risk reinsurance and life reinsurance to risk structures and liability management Clients include insurance and reinsurance companies, banks and corporations
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 16 Aug 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Imagine Group has offices in Barbados, Bermuda, Copenhagen, Dublin, London, Munich, New York, Philadelphia, St Louis and Sydney, and is expanding into new markets, including Australasia and the Far East.
The Group has a capital base of US$500 million and more than US$1.5 billion in assets.
Its major operating units received Financial Strength ratings from Fitch and AM.` Each day, the Imagine Group processes business data from all of its offices around the globe.
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The majority of these locations are customer focused and few have technical staff in place to manage complex data storage, networking or recovery procedures.
In addition, the company uses a disparate mix of information technology (IT) systems and applications - Dell servers running databases and Microsoft applications such as MS Exchange - and a variety of internal and external storage devices.
Because the sites handled data critical to Imagine's business operations, the company had to ensure that the information was protected 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
When looking for a data protection solution, Imagine had five key requirements.
The solution had to 1) provide a solid data protection strategy for its global operations, 2) minimize the need for significant new investment in IT equipment and personnel and keep the total cost of ownership (TCO) low, 3) ensure that, should any site fail, the data is restored swiftly so business can continue without interruption, 4) comply with FSA regulations which require remotely backed-up data to be easily accessible should any compliance queries arise, and 5) keep Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) as close to zero as possible.
RPO refers to the amount of data that could be lost during the recovery process, and RTO is the time it takes to get a location up and running after a disaster.
For a global company with heterogeneous systems at each location, this was quite a challenge.
Imagine chose Topio Data Protection Suite (TDPS) as its worldwide data protection standard because TDPS met all of its requirements.
Topio's innovative, heterogeneous disaster recovery and data protection solutions enable Imagine to self-define and efficiently implement its data protection and replication strategies, without significant additional investment in hardware or other tools.
TDPS will also dramatically reduce Imagine's network bandwidth and storage costs.
Taurus, a premier Topio business partner, handles all aspects of TDPS implementations around the world, ensuring an efficient installation process.
Imagine's TDPS solution is replicating data from business-critical servers at five of the company's production sites (Barbados, Bermuda, Dublin, London and New York) to a standalone secondary site outside Dublin, which is built around a Storage Area Network (SAN) based on IBM FastT products.
Topio clients are installed on all of Imagine's production servers, which replicate data over the company's IP networks to a Topio server at the secondary site.
If necessary, technicians can access target volumes for testing or, in case of disaster, the volumes can be accessed via virtual standby servers.
This enables Imagine to test or implement disaster recovery procedures without requiring onsite staff at the primary or secondary sites.
Once the secondary site was set up, technicians ran capacity planning for each Imagine location in order to optimise the company's data protection and network utilization.
All servers were then synchronized to optimise performance, some over the network, some sing off-line synchronization.
The servers are now in continuous replication to the secondary site, with periodic testing carried out to verify data consistency.
Now, Imagine's data is securely replicated, stored, and managed - and can be quickly recovered - from a single location without extensive changes to the company's networking or storage infrastructures.
In addition, Imagine saved money on equipment costs and salaries because it did not have to hire technicians to manage its data protection processes at each site around the globe.
Paul De Munnik, Imagine's IT director, said, "We're delighted with the solution that Topio and Taurus have implemented for us.
We now know that all our data around the world is safe, no matter what happens - and importantly, that we can be back up and running again shortly should disaster strike.
They were also able to develop a very attractive proposition for us in terms of total cost of ownership - we did not have to change our existing IT infrastructure or make significant investments in IT personnel at our many different sites.
As Imagine grows, so will its data protection needs.
But the company knows that Topio will expand along with its business ambitions, with minimal investment in IT hardware and systems, and with clear control of operations and cost from a single site.
Imagine is a company on the move, and thanks to Topio it can rest assured that wherever its business interests travel, they are not at risk.
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