Disaster Recovery Case Study - Able Services

Able Services are an established service provider to many key clients in the leisure/retail sector.

The Brief/Challenge

Able Services PDM Ltd are an established service provider to many key clients in the leisure/retail sector. Primarily offering a reactive service but with a proactive approach to plumbing, drainage and mechanical solutions. 

LP Networks have been in partnership with Able Services PDM Ltd for over 10 years. As part of their regular account meetings regarding their IT Roadmap, the lack of a Disaster Recovery on the physical servers was highlighted. Able Services PDM Ltd understood the need to continually improve on compliance; to know they had a reliable Disaster Recovery system in place to ensure the business could continue to function within minutes if anything were to happen to the local hardware.

The Brief was to

• Provide a Multi-server backup and disaster recovery solution
• The solution to be cost-effective & ensure compliance to recognised standards (GDPR, ISO, CyberEssentials)
• Perform a Full Offsite Disaster Recovery test
• Decommission the previous solution

The Solution

LP Networks is a global partner with Datto, a channel-only provider of BCDR solutions (Backup & Disaster Recovery). The project was broken down into multiple phases:

• The first phase - Discovery works to establish the current size of the data estate to determine the best product required for the client. 
• The second phase -  The servers were prepared for the initial imaging and seed backups. Depending on the size of data this seed can be over the internet, or where the line speed is not sufficient and USB Round-Robin service is initiated.
• Third phase - The new device was then installed, configured and initial backups are taken and test both locally and in the cloud.

Following the implementation of the new BCDR solution, the client visited the LP Networks office to complete a full offsite Disaster Recovery test, which provided evidence for their audit needs.

Benefits

Able Services PDM Ltd now have a complete Disaster Recovery and Backup Solution

• Hourly local snapshots of the server for ‘roll-back’
• Provides a safety net for their physical server, any hardware issues can be resolved whilst a virtual server is running on the ‘DR’ platform.
• Integration with LP Networks monitoring platform for monitoring and reporting
• Fulfils the clients auditing compliance
• DR tests can be done in ‘real-time’, so it doesn’t affect the business operations, allowing full compliance without shutting the live services down.