1. case study
Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity: Energy
Technologent helps oil and gas company design
a DR site and provide the documentation and
testing needed for an effective DR plan.
An oil and gas exploration and production company with operations around
the world wished to launch an IT-focused disaster recovery (DR) initiative. Be-
cause the company is publicly traded, it needed to assure shareholders that it
was taking steps to protect vital data and ensure continuity of operations in
the event of a disaster.
Because the customer preferred to maintain its IT infrastructure internally, a
cloud-based Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service solution was not a consideration.
In addition, the organization had signed a contract with a co-location facility
about 300 miles from its U.S. headquarters, and sought to leverage that
relationship to build out its DR site.
However, the customer needed assistance in establishing recovery time ob-
jectives (RTOs), architecting the DR facility and developing the runbooks re-
quired to execute a formal DR plan.The customer had a lean IT organization
with little experience in the development and execution of a DR program.The
customer was also focused on a number of other business initiatives world-
wide and lacked the resources to dedicate to an initiative of this scope.
The Technologent Solution
Technologent provided two teams — one focused on the data center tech-
nology and the other focused on people, processes, documentation and for-
mal execution of the DR program.The infrastructure team included specialists
in compute, networking, storage, virtualization and data replication, and
focused on designing a secondary data center that would complement the
customer’s production environment.This team inventoried IT assets, including
monitoring and management tools, and gained an understanding of how
the equipment was configured and integrated.The result was a requirements
document that enabled the customer to begin ordering the necessary equip-
ment for the DR site.
In parallel, the infrastructure team assisted the customer with a complete re-
design of its data protection environment and an upgrade of primary storage
supporting all of its production platforms.The customer was also in the pro-
cess of virtualizing additional apps, and Technologent helped consolidate the
compute environment into a denser footprint based upon the Cisco Unified
Computing System (UCS) platform.
The second Technologent team included two certified business continuity
(BC) planners and a project manager.This group conducted an “application
profile” in order to identify mission-critical applications and categorize them
according to 24-, 48- or 72-hour RTOs.The team then wrote runbooks with
shutdown, failover and startup procedures for the 25 apps with 24-hour
RTOs.
The BC team worked with the customer’s application owners to validate
that all the applications functioned properly on the DR site.The team took
the application owners through a tabletop test — a walkthrough of the DR
plan — then ultimately performed failover tests of all the mission-critical ap-
plications.A battery of tests was conducted in an iterative process to help the
customer’s in-house team adopt and successfully execute the DR program.
Deliverables included more than 100 guides, templates and other documents
in accordance with ISO/IEC standards, as well as executive reports detailing
how money was being spent, what progress was made and a road map for
the future. In addition,Technologent is helping the customer correlate the DR
plan with its change management processes to ensure that IT can keep the
documents up-to-date and ready for execution for ongoing cadence testing
and in the event of an actual disaster.
In the next phase,Technologent will repeat the process with the remaining
mission-critical apps.As with the first phase, the Technologent team will train
the customer’s in-house personnel so that they can conduct tests using the
provided documentation and tools.
Solution Summary:
• IT inventory and assessment and design of a complementary DR
site
• Redesign and upgrade of data protection and storage
environments
• Application virtualization, server consolidation and data
replication
• Identification of mission-critical apps and development of
documentation to facilitate DR processes
• Thorough testing of the DR plan and training of the customer’s IT
staff
• Correlation of the DR plan with change management processes to
facilitate ongoing updates
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