Management at bedding manufacturer Sealy NZ Ltd are sleeping more soundly at night after switching to an offsite remote disaster recovery (DR) solution that ensures they lose no more than 15 minutes’ data in the event of a crash. The problem was identified during an annual IT review. Although the company’s former tape backup product was reporting successful backups, minimal data was being written to tape in a readable format. As a result, Sealy sought an alternative solution.

“We experienced the pain of potential data loss and decided we never wanted to be in that position again. We made a st strategic decision to go with an organisation and solution that was able to eliminate the cost and complexity of backup, file recovery and disaster recovery”>

Hugh Rockfort – Director, Sealy NZ Ltd

Disaster Recovery Group “Saved the Day”, On Wednesday 21st of July 2010, FlexiGroup (New Zealand) Limited identified a significant error on their Primary Domain Controller which affected the Active Directory settings and subsequently their Microsoft Exchange Servers in both New Zealand and Australia. In all six servers suffered outage due to a flow on effect from the initial fault

Luke Wilkinson – IS Manager – FlexiGroup (New Zealand) Ltd ‘Activated’ their DR Group Business Continuity Arrangement at 8:15pm, by 8:45pm a DR Group recovery engineer was onsite and had begun the process of recovering the entire server to a ‘known good point in time’. With the ability to recover to ‘any 15 minute point in time’ the engineer in consultation with FlexiGroup chose that recovery should be from 8:00am that same day.

By 9:15pm – being only 30 minutes after arriving on site the server was fully recovered and connected to the network. This recovery corrected the issue with all six exchange servers and replicated successfully across all other domain controllers; the recovery avoided the potential of having to restore from tape the exchange servers and domain controllers back to the day before potentially losing enormous amounts of data and business productivity, let alone taking many hours of hard graft to achieve a successful result.

Luke commented… “We have made a big deal about this at a group level as the only reason we were able to correct the entire organisations exchange servers was because of our great recovery process provided by DR Group. Our counterparts is Aussie couldn’t get their recovery to work so we basically ‘saved the day’. This is a big win to show our company how valuable our partnership with DRG is.”

Luke Wilkinson – IS Manager, Flexigroup NZ Ltd