Customer Story: Local Government Agency

Data^#3 implements VMware vCloud Air for Local Government Agency to Solve Disaster Recovery Challenges

Company Overview
The local government organisation services a rapidly growing city in Australia.

Business Challenge
The customer had concerns with their existing disaster recovery solution and its ability to meet expanding requirements. The existing solution proved to be highly complex, challenging and costly to maintain. They recognised the need for greater protection across their many IT services. With existing hardware reaching end of life, and facing potentially higher replacement costs, the customer sought to look for a more comprehensive and sustainable disaster recovery solution.

Solution
Due to their solid existing relationship, Data^#3 was selected as their partner of choice, for the consultation and provision of a new disaster recovery solution. Data^#3’s proven outcome-based approach and their demonstrable experience in the provision of VMware solutions.

To address the challenges identified in an efficient and cost effective manner, the solution included the implementation of two VMware vCloud Air services.

First, a VMware vCloud Air disaster recovery solution was provided with a secondary offsite data centre location to host replicated critical business services. The vSphere environment was then connected to the VMware vCloud Air disaster recovery via the VMware Replication Appliance.

Data^#3 used the replication connection between the primary data centre and vCloud Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) in parallel to the existing site to seamlessly extend their physical on-premises infrastructure to the Cloud. In turn, this allowed Data^#3 to replicate the target machines to the vCloud DRaaS before decommissioning the old site.

Second, a virtual desktop solution was built along with critical authentication and messaging services in an additional VMware vCloud Air instance. This ensured that in the event of a total primary data centre loss, it would not only replicate the critical services, but also their dependencies. The solution allowed the existing DR solution to remain in place until all machines were replicated and tested. This ensured that all tier one applications remained protected.

“Cloud-delivered Disaster Recovery is a great Cloud use case in that costs are minimal until it’s actually used. This customer was able to decommission a secondary data centre which provided immediate return on investment and simplified ongoing operational management.”

David Barclay, National Practice Manager – VMware, Data^#3

Outcome
The solution met all the disaster recovery requirements requested and now provides the customer with increased efficiency and cost effectiveness. The customer can now replicate and protect all their critical virtual machines to the VMware vCloud Air DRaaS environment.

This migration allowed the customer to begin initiating the decommissioning of their secondary data centre and avoid significate capital costs by moving to a flexible operational consumption model.

Data^#3 implemented the solution and aided the customer in the replication and testing of business critical services. In addition, Data^#3 also built a remote access solution in VMware’s vCloud Air to provide business continuity and access to critical services.

Technology
VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery as a Service.

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To learn more about how Data^#3 can assist your organisation, call 1300 23 28 23 or enquire online.