1. Case Study Customer: Credium
Industry: Financial services
A CLOUD SOLUTION FOR BACKUP AND Suppliers: a consortium of GTS
COMPREHENSIVE DISASTER RECOVERY Czech and GAPP Systems
ABOUT THE CUSTOMER
Credium, describes itself as a universal financial company in the leasing and credit markets. The company provides financial
Transmission system of GAZ-SYSTEM S.A.
leasing, operative leasing and consumer loans to commercial and non-commercial entities. In addition to the Czech market, the company
is active in Slovakia through its subsidiary Credium Slovakia, and through its subsidiaries Optimalit, and Optimalit Slovakia, it offers a
range of insurance products. Easy accessibility to financial services for consumers is provided through auto dealers in the Czech Republic
and Slovakia.
KEY POINTS
The Credium Company needed back- and launch all the servers in the virtual hours. The Credium Company’s system
up infrastructure and continual data syn- backup datacenter. The solution mini- is composed of several dozen applica-
chronization to a remote location so that mizes the risk of negative consequences tions and database servers processing
in the event of an accident, the backup on the commercial activities of the Cre- data in the range of several terabytes.
location could serve as a means of run- dium Company due to catastrophic fail-
ning the critical information systems ure. It was, moreover, unnecessary for
necessary for normal company opera- the company to make any investment in
tions. The backup infrastructure runs in redundant technical and program equip- WHAT THE CUSTOMER SAYS:
the virtual hosting environment of GTS ment, which would not have been effec- “We were looking for a solution that
Czech and continual synchronization of tively utilized. would be completely compatible with our
data is carried out using the FalconStor system and ensure the quickest return to
Software Continuous Data Protector BACKGROUND operations for our company in the event of
supplied by GAPP Systems, who provide The Credium Company was assigned a disaster. We considered the possibility of
backup at virtual data storage locations. the task of systematically resolving the building our own system with an external
The solution provides for the storage of problem of disaster recovery by its par- data center as well as the option of leasing
all backup data in the primary location ent company. The creation of a backup a virtual hosting environment. Finally, we
for partial data restoration and in the infrastructure in a remote location and were convinced by the advantages of the
virtual hosting environment for backup assurance of continual data synchro- GTS cloud solution – not only do we have
operations restart. In addition to this nization with this locality were to be a virtual backup center whose parameters
continually running system, there are components of the solution. During a we can easily and quickly modify but we
pre-figured “shadow” servers that cor- catastrophic event, the backup location also have access to computer capacity in
respond precisely to the structure and would then serve as a means of opera- case of disaster or failure that we pay for
configurations of the customer’s prima- tion for the key information systems only in the event we use it.”
ry system. In the event of a disastrous necessary for the customer’s normal
event and failure at the Credium Com- business activities with the ability of Daniel Šnor - Group Leader,
pany’s primary location, GTS will divert launching and connecting the system to IT infrastructure, Credium
network traffic to the backup location full operational status within a matter of
2. CONNECTION DIAGRAM
Virtual Servers VM VM VM
(VMware, Hyper-V)
FalconStor CDP
FalconStor CDP
Replication
Continual Local Copy to the
Physical Servers Backup
Snapshots remote
Remote Copy
Data Journal
location
Snapshots
Data Journal
Primary Location Remote Location
SOLUTION
The central element of this compre- optical cable and this is in turn backed data at the local or the remote storage
hensive solution in terms of the virtual up by microwave connection. This mini- location. All backed up data is saved at
datacenter on the GTS platform is vir- mizes the risk of communication link the primary location and is at the same
tual data storage designed for con- failure and the resulting inability to time transmitted to the backup loca-
tinuous asynchronous data backup for carry out continual backup. In case of tion. Immediate data recovery can be
the Credium Company. This backup a catastrophic event at the company’s accomplished from the local backup at
is carried out by means of the Falcon- headquarters, the crisis staff at Credium the primary location. This approach is
Stor Software Continuous Data Protec- launches the disaster recovery process. particularly useful in the event an ac-
tor system software running on virtual According to this process, GTS will then cident occurs only in certain systems,
servers within the virtual datacenter. divert Credium’s network traffic from for example, in a hardware component,
The system receives incoming data from the primary location to the backup loca- user error or in an application causing
the customer’s primary location and tion – its virtual datacenter and start up data corruption. Data in the backup lo-
continually saves the data to the virtual its virtual backup servers. GTS’s ability cation are, as a rule, used in cases when
storage location. Backup virtual servers to provide temporary computer power is it is not possible to operate the produc-
are always in the “off” state during nor- used for this purpose. In a short mo- tion system at the primary location. At
mal operations (no charges for electrical ment, the customer has available many the moment the crisis staff declares an
energy or licenses) awaiting a situation times the usual computing capacity in end to an emergency condition, there is
in which there is a failure at the primary comparison to normal backup opera- a reverse synchronization of data from
location. The whole system is integrated tions. The end user accesses the sys- the backup location to the primary loca-
into the customer’s MPLS VPN infra- tem either within the MPLS VPN from tion and a return of servers and network
structure and thus is a part of the pri- the backup office or temporarily from to normal operation. Regular, annual
vate network of the Credium Company. home via the Internet. The advantage tests are implemented as a part of the
In terms of the MPLS VPN infrastructure, of the FalconStor Software Continuous solution with the goal of ensuring reli-
connection to the Credium center is by Data Protector is its ability to backup able disaster recovery.
Summary // Moving to the GTS virtual platform brought the Credium Company a number of benefits:
● minimized risk of catastrophic events and their negative repercussions on business activities,
● zero investment in backup technical and program equipment - it would be necessary to procure such systems but they would
not be efficiently used,
● the possibility of modifying the configuration and capacity of the virtual data center at any time according to current need,
● availability of standby computer capacity subject to fee only in case of actual use.