Challenge
Widespread power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy left Chilewich Sultan’s critical business systems offline for five days and highlighted the need for a solid disaster recovery (DR) solution.
Results
Skytap and Maxava delivered cloud-based DR-as-a-Service that keeps replicas of Chilewich’s production environment in Skytap in Microsoft Azure, and uses Maxava DR to replicate approximately six million daily transactions in real-time.
About Chilewich
Design is everything at Chilewich Sultan LLC, creator and manufacturer of furniture and high-end textiles. The same attention to detail has also been applied to the company’s new Disaster Recovery (DR) solution.
Chilewich Sultan’s Challenge
Based in New York, the company’s IBM i on Power Systems computing environment was housed on-premise until Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. Backups occurred daily and were sent offsite with a recovery time objective of 24 hours. After the hurricane, widespread power outages left Chilewich Sultan as an unfortunate victim. Although the server itself was unharmed, nobody could log into it. The company’s systems were down for five days until power was restored.
Chilewich considered purchasing another Power Systems server to mirror its production environment but the costs associated with hardware, software, remote data center costs, and IT administration would have been prohibitive.
Skytap Solution
Chilewich worked with Maxava, a global DR, HA, and monitoring provider, to implement a DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering from Skytap and Maxava that keeps replicas of its production environment in Skytap in Microsoft Azure, and uses Maxava DR to replicate approximately six million daily transactions in real-time.
In the event of an outage, Chilewich can swap users and run its business from Skytap without data loss or significant downtime. The company only pays for the day-to-day use, and when more capacity is required, only pays for what is actually used. Chilewich estimates that the Maxava-Skytap solution saves about two-thirds of a traditional DR solution.
“In the event of an outage, we might be down for four hours or less, but we wouldn’t lose our final transactions. And once we’re back online on the mirrored partition with Skytap, we can immediately get back to work.”
Robert Sentell, IT Manager, Chilewich Sultan
