Financial and risk services provider Alexander Forbes has completed a R7 million upgrade of its disaster recovery (DR) environment.
The environment took six months to upgrade and was implemented by Dimension Data, with storage solutions supplied by Drive Control Corporation (DCC).
Alexander Forbes' IT security and compliance officer, Dion Fowles, explains the need for the upgrade: "Our business continues to grow and we had to replace and enhance much of our DR systems to keep pace with the expansion of our production environment."
The company currently backs up 60TB of data on a daily basis and has 500 servers, 200 of which are mission-critical. The systems which the company uses are mostly custom developed.
DiData's GM of Data Centre and Storage, Grant Morgan, says it is one of the most complete systems DiData has implemented to date.
"We determined the bandwidth, linking and power requirements and then planned and built the data centre at the Alexander Forbes' new Telkom NNOC DR site. It is a fully-integrated first-world best practice system. In particular, the use of virtualisation was critical to meet stringent recovery requirements."
Alexander Forbes will look at expanding its virtual server environment and adding in more disk capacity to accommodate the growth of its data and systems.
"In a worst-case scenario, if both our key buildings collapse, 212 key production servers need to be brought back online via the DR site," Fowles says.
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