We had some great feedback from our infrastructure symposium last week. We’ve been working with some exciting new and proven partners over the past six months to bring some compelling infrastructure solutions to market. The market, and our customer base, has seen a notable decline in server refreshes and general investment in core infrastructure over the past two years and we recognise the need to bring something fresh and interesting to help our customers reduce costs, improve service and increase efficiency.
The symposium explained how Panacea’s managed services combined with some great solutions from Sonicwall, Mimecast and Riverbed can deliver significant benefits.
By far the largest number of technical support calls we take each day are to do with tape backups. Whether it’s customers whose backups have failed overnight or others who are struggling to restore individual files or whole systems, tape backups are more than a little challenging for all concerned. The need for regular tape replacement (how often do people really do this?!), limited backup windows, limited tape capacity, somewhere to store tapes offsite and the inability for end users to quickly restore files or applications makes them an immensely troublesome. Sonicwall’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) solutions provide continuous backup of data to an appliance with automatic versioning. Files can be restored by end users through a simple web interface and up to 17 versions of a file can be restored meaning that the Excel spreadsheet you accidentally overwrote two weeks ago can probably still be recovered. The savings in time and the improvements to business continuity are so compelling that it’s difficult to think of a company who couldn’t benefit from this technology.
E-mail has become the defacto communication channel for business. Transactions are mainly instigated, progressed and completed via e-mail and yet many businesses are unable to quickly recover individual e-mails, follow e-mail trails and have no long term, easily accessible repository for e-mails. For most businesses the loss of their e-mail server is a major issue and yet few have any real resilience built into their environment. Mimecast provide a cloud based service that replicates all incoming and outgoing e-mails. Those e-mails are checked for SPAM and viruses and you can utilise the service to append signatures and drive marketing campaigns. Your e-mails are replicated the three geographically distributed sites and should your local e-mail server fail then you can quickly switch to use the cloud service. When your own server returns to working order the two re-synchronise and life continues as normal. Individuals can retrieve individual e-mails through Outlook making it simple to prove transaction histories.
Riverbed provide very clever appliances and software to maximise the available bandwidth and to greatly reduce latency between sites. For companies with multiple locations this can be a godsend. Performance can be increased by up to 90% and latency can be dramatically cut meaning that applications can genuinely be centralised and accessed from remote sites thus reducing administrative costs and improving user satisfaction. Rather than upgrading lines it is often more cost effective to use Riverbed appliances to make better use of the lines you already have. The software even works on mobile devices connected over 3G networks. The improvements really do have to be seen to be believed which makes it a good thing that we can quickly implement a pilot for you to try for a few weeks. If you like what you see then you can keep the kit and away you go.
All of these solutions improve productivity, help guarantee business continuity and reduce costs. They all take a different slant on problems we’ve all experienced for years but for which there have previously been few solutions. As customers extend the working life of their servers in an attempt to cut costs there is an increased risk of major systems failures that can lead to business failure. This year we have seen one customer a month hit by a catastrophic failure that has placed their business at risk. The solutions above would greatly reduce the risk of failure affecting business continuity which must be our key aim in the current economic climate.
Tags: backup, bandwidth, business continuity, CDP, disaster, e-mail, email, Exchange, latency, Mimecast, networks, Outlook, recovery, Riverbed, Sonicwall, tapes
Panacea Blog (RSS)