“HP provided elegant and cost-effective answers to an age-old IT problem. Through a combination of expert consultants, quality hardware, and robust management tools, HP delivered a disaster recovery solution that supports fast, seamless failover to a backup production environment without burdening us with excess system capacity.” – Guy Wood, VP, Management Information Systems, Agricore United

No corporation today can afford to ignore disaster recovery (DR). But like all IT programs, DR can be implemented in a variety of ways. For Agricore United, Canada’s largest grain handler and supplier of seed, crop nutrition, and crop protection products, a new HP DR infrastructure not only supports state-of-the-art business continuity, but does it cost-effectively.

Innovative idea — but would it work?
Agricore United’s IT systems serve 300 locations across three time zones through a Sybase database with a front end of home-grown point-of-sale and inventory management applications. For many years, the company contracted disaster recovery services from a third-party vendor; the vendor maintained an IT environment in an off-site DR facility. Also, twice a day, tapes of Agricore United’s databases were transported off-site.

Guy Wood, VP, Management Information Systems, Agricore United, wasn’t fully comfortable with this approach, however. It was costly; the lease for the facility and hardware alone added up to about $250,000 annually, with another $50,000 per year for off-site vaulting of data. Any time Agricore United made a change to its environment, it had to coordinate with the IT provider to mirror the change in the DR site. Annual testing of the back-up systems added another $50,000 to Agricore United’s operating budget.

Most troubling of all, Wood couldn’t be 100 percent sure that the DR environment would perform. “Although we checked it once a year, I always felt uneasy, wondering if it would work if we needed it.”

So Wood sat down with his staff to re-think its approach to DR. They determined the single biggest user of Agricore United’s IT was MIS; they also knew that in the event of a disaster, the most critical systems were the production servers, not the development servers. So why not design an infrastructure to leverage Agricore United’s development systems for production back-up? “It seemed plausible to create a hot DR implementation based on two live environments. If anything happened to our production systems, we could just roll production over to our development servers.”

The idea looked great on paper, but Wood wanted to validate it, so he turned to HP.

Help from the experts
Asking HP for help, Wood says, was a natural choice. “We’ve worked with HP since the early 1990s, and have tremendous respect for their expertise. We knew they could help with everything from design to technology.”

A solutions architect from HP Services began by leading a comprehensive feasibility test to see if Agricore United’s idea would work. When test validated the concept, the HP Services team worked with Agricore United to refine the environment specifications. “We originally planned to use 120 servers split between two facilities,” Wood says, “but HP recommended we consider blades running a VMware environment.” Because HP blades can be recreated very quickly, Wood says, using them reduced the complexity of the environment without compromising Agricore United’s ability to contain the impact of a server failure.

Agricore United accepted the recommendation, and the design was finalized. Five HP ProLiant BL45p server blades were installed at Agricore United’s corporate headquarters to serve as production systems; another five BL45p blades were deployed at an unstaffed remote location as the development systems. The servers run a VMware environment to allow them to be configured flexibly. Each site is also equipped with an HP StorageWorks XP10000 Disk Array-based SAN, which allows for maximized capacity utilization and up-time.

The two sites are cabled together to enable the development servers to function as “hot” disaster recovery systems. Every hour, snapshot copies of the production environment are sent to the development servers using HP StorageWorks Business Copy XP software. HP StorageWorks Continuous Access XP software is used to provide continuous data replication between the two sites; and HP OpenView Storage Data Protector software is used to perform periodic data backup to tape.

The hardware is all covered by HP’s three year, 24x7 Support Plus program to provide another level of assurance that any hardware problems will be quickly resolved.

From design to real-world success
“HP provided elegant and cost-effective answers to an age-old IT problem,” Wood says. “Through a combination of expert consultants, quality hardware, and robust management tools, HP delivered a disaster recovery solution that supports fast, seamless failover to a backup production environment without burdening us with excess system capacity.”

The systems have also survived their first real-world test, Wood says. “Shortly after implementation we experienced a major failure of one of our production servers. Within seconds, production rolled over to our development servers. It was completely transparent to our users.”

This unplanned test reinforced Wood’s confidence in HP’s business continuity and availability solutions. “HP enabled us to reduce our annual IT budget by over $300,000 while providing a truly state-of-the-art disaster recovery solution. We knew we could build a better DR environment, and with HP’s help, that’s exactly what we have.”

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