2010-04-21

By Editor, CIR

Renewable energy provider Infinis has deployed Double-Take Availability business continuity software across its critical applications and business data, ensuring that email systems, job scheduling application and database servers are all protected against the risk of downtime.

Infinis provides renewable energy from over 80 production sites across the UK. As part of its service, the company runs a maintenance and work scheduling system for its mobile workforce. Jobs are allotted to engineers in real time, so work can be prioritised according to its severity. Steve Merrell, head of systems at Infinis, is responsible for the company's IT infrastructure, and uses Double-Take Availability to protect this application against the effect of downtime, along with other email and database servers within the main data centre.

"Our work Management scheduling system is a critical application for us, as it allows us to raise work orders according to how important the task is. If a serious incident occurs, this can be moved to the head of the queue. However, if that application is not available for any reason, then we would not be able to update our engineering staff. Using Double-Take Software, we can protect this application alongside all our business-critical IT systems; even if a full site failure occurs, we can transfer everything over to our back-up site and be up and running in a couple of hours. Double-Take Availability is a central part of our business continuity plan, and gives the IT and business team peace of mind," said Merrell.

Double-Take Availability is installed on 25 Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers that host the company's applications, connected to an EMC Network Attached Storage box in the company's head office in Nottingham. It replicates workloads and data to Infinis' back-up data centre in Birmingham, where secondary machines are hosted within a virtualised data centre based on VMware. In the event of a failure, users are redirected to the workload at the second site, and can continue working.

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