ABAC implements an affordable disaster recovery solution using virtualization and data mirroring technologies.

Objective: Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC), located in Tifton, is a State College in the University System of Georgia. They experienced a catastrophic failure when one of their Windows servers failed. This server handled scheduling and registration for the Continuing Education Department and was a file share server for the OITS and the President’s office. After taking several days to rebuild this critical server and get it back online, ABAC knew they needed a Disaster Recovery solution that would reduce their downtime from days to hours.

Solution: After hearing about data mirroring, ABAC was interested to learn more about this solution. Cnetics related how they had worked with another college to successfully implement a DR solution using VMware virtual server and SWSM to mirror data from the production server to a second server on a continuous basis so that data was always updated on the backup. This solution provided an acceptable failover time with minimal data loss and proved to be reliable and affordable.

Cnetics recommended this solution to ABAC and discussed some pricing and features options including automatic versus manual failover. Since state budgets were tight, ABAC chose the more affordable manual failover solution that would still provide minimal downtime and data loss in the event of a catastrophic failure. ABAC had the option to use existing hardware for the backup servers which could make this solution even more cost effective. They opted to purchase a low-end HP DL380 and an MSA 1500 to give their new DR system horsepower they could grow into.

Once the new system was designed, Cnetics’ engineers worked side by side with the Network System Administrator during the set up and installation of the hardware and software to help him understand how the new DR system operated. They provided mentoring during the physical to virtual migration of the operating systems and the applications from the production servers to the backup server. Cnetics also returned later to add redundant controllers to the MSA 1500.

“The Cnetics engineers were super,” said Ernest Kelly, a Network System Administrator at ABAC. “They answered my questions, spent time to work through things with me and explained any issues that came up. We have been well pleased with the support Cnetics has provided us thus far, especially since other vendors’ engineers haven’t been quite so helpful on other types of projects in the past.”

Results: Along with the benefit of being a less expensive SAN solution, ABAC found an added benefit in using a virtualized backup server. They were able to migrate and backup legacy applications that ran on an outdated OS which would not run on a new physical server. “Cnetics was very helpful migrating our legacy apps using a VMware tool that worked great,” said Kelly. “It was a seamless migration to the virtual server. This was a tremendous help since there was no need to build a new server from scratch. This is an amazing capability! Since ABAC doesn’t get all the funding that the larger institutions get, this helps us move forward without a huge hit to the budget. This was an awesome investment!”

Kelly is the only administrator for the Windows servers so he feels the pressure to keep business operation going. “I made sure we tested the new virtual server, but you just never know for sure how something will work until a catastrophe happens,” added Kelly. “When this recent catastrophic failure happened, I had the failover system up and running in less than four hours. The actual conversion took less than 2 hours. The rest of the time was used to diagnose the problem and to see if the production server could be brought back up online in a reasonable time frame. My users just perceived it as a temporary interruption in service and were happy to find all their data intact. This took a lot of pressure off me and made the investment in this system look good to my superiors and administrators.”

“After having to use it and seeing how well it works, I’m sold. We’re looking at converting more production servers to this expansion system in the near future,” stated Kelly.