South Point appointed Westcon partner and specialist ICT services provider and systems integrator, AVeS, to help it develop a technical architecture that would meets its business needs. South Point had to ensure that its data and the associated access to this data could be consistently accessed from its nationwide offices via its internet service provider data centre.
After closer inspection of the customer's environment, the AVeS team developed an environment that included a sure-fire back-up product by way of Symantec Backup Exec 2012. The Symantec software would enable South Point to be able to take advantage of data duplication across its IT environment, as well as create a long-term data-restoration point.
In addition, the company then introduced two Microsoft Hyper-V clusters, with a secondary cluster being deployed at its ISP's data centre. In the event of a triggered disaster, all of South Point's resilient links and services would be available from remote regions.
"The technology stack included a new Dell server environment and Microsoft Server 2012 with Hyper-V virtualisation capabilities. This design allowed us to provide native replication on an operating system level. This ensured that often costly hardware replication technology was not required for site replication," said Charl Ueckermann, MD of AVeS. "Furthermore, all instances in the primary site were replicated on a 15-minute schedule for readily available recovery points."
Application-aware clustering features delivered through Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, ensured that the delivery of critical messaging platforms will always be available through a cross-site DAG (Database Availability Group).
"Delivery of an all-encompassing solution within a limited time frame was always going to be a challenge. By choosing tools such as Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) to help us, we remained confident that the solution we built was correctly planned and architected," explained Ueckermann.
"Zero migration downtime and an errorless delivery were critical. It was also imperative that recovery documentation was created along the way for ease of recovery for the client," he ended.
