CSC in India Supports Disaster Recovery For A Mining Company

The Australia-based client dealing with mining and processing earth’s mineral resources has recently adopted a modified strategy for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The objective to improve both agility and effectiveness in supporting emerging business process improvements and other organisational initiatives. This strategy involves adopting a single ERP system, based on the SAP application suite.

The Challenge

The Australia-based client dealing with mining and processing earth’s mineral resources has recently adopted a modified strategy for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The objective to improve both agility and effectiveness in supporting emerging business process improvements and other organisational initiatives. This strategy involves adopting a single ERP system, based on the SAP application suite.

The client’s new business solution will be supported by a single development environment and will have one or two production instances based on the performance needs. The development and production environments will have a common architectural base and will be operated and maintained using common processes, procedures and standards.

San Diego client location was chosen for the primary production services to optimise the global end user experience by minimising the network latency. The Chicago client location is used to support the ERP development and quality assurance (QA) environments and provide disaster recovery capabilities for the production environments in San Diego.

The Solution

The India team keeps regular backup copies for the SDDC production and pre-production servers. Though the CDC servers are with HADR option as standby, the backup copies are used to bring up the DR servers at CDC with latest data. An architectural idea and implementation that helps reduce the DR time is the remote syncing of the NetBackup catalogs. This process avoids the recovery of the entire catalog images by importing catalog from tapes, which generally takes a long time.

The India team has attended all the DR workshops conducted by the Business Continuity Services team. They developed step-by-step procedures for activities done from storage and backups perspective.

Before conducting a final DR test in front of the client, two practice sessions were conducted. These tests were very successful and now the team is preparing for a final test in front of the client. Michael Smith - Storage CoE Manager, CSC Australia says, “I would like to highlight the great job the India team did for us last week before and during the testing. They had to take the work onboard with very little advance notice and no experience with the client procedures. All the feedback I have had has been excellent on their performance during the DR test.”

This is truly a demonstration of CSC’s ability to utilise its talented resource pool spread across the globe thereby enhancing the value delivered to its global customers.

The Results

The client account was outsourced to CSC in India in March, 2006. On this account, CSC in India Unix team is working in collaboration with the DBA team in CSC in Australia. CSC in India backup team is handling data backup and storage for the client. The challenge is to ensure data protection in case of disaster recovery (DR).

After the project started, one of the team members from India participated in the knowledge transfer session conducted by the Australian team. The team regularly takes backups for all the client machines and ensures that catalog data syncing between the two centres happens.

The two data centres of the client, San Diego and Chicago, act as DR site for one another. If disaster happens on one site, another will be made available in a very small amount of time. The servers that are connected to San Diego Data Center (SDDC) site are called Production and Pre-Production boxes, whereas those connected to Chicago Data Center (CDC) site are called Development and Quality Assurance boxes.

HADR, a built-in feature of DB2, creates and maintains a fault tolerant replica of database.

It provides alternative for delivering high-availability solution by replicating data from a source database, called the primary, to a target database, called the standby.

HADR provides protection for both partial and complete site failures. Combined with the new automatic client reroute capability, HADR provides transparency to the application regardless of the failure type from hardware, network or software issues to disaster scenarios like fire.

HADR provides multiple levels of protection allowing flexibility in the environment. Additionally, DB2 provides an easy to use wizard that allows the entire configuration to be setup in just minutes time.

If the production box at SDDC fails, a HADR box at CDC needs to be manually started as primary database to make the production applications (SAP) available 24x7.

This means production SAP application servers at SDDC are primary database boxes being backed up using HADR feature of DB2 machines at CDC. The DR servers at CDC can be restored with recent data from the tapes.

All the servers are in NetBackup (backup software) rotation so that their file systems and databases (DB2, MS-SQL) are backed up regularly. To check consistency tests are conducted to correct the procedures and process flow and show the readiness to face a disaster, and make the client aware of data protection.