Success Stories

CSC Supports Disaster Recovery for Mining Company

Client:

A world leader in finding, mining and processing the earth’s mineral resources.

Challenge:

Ensure data protection in case of disaster recovery (DR).

Solution:

The CSC team has come up with a step-by-step procedure for the activities that are to be done from storage and backups perspective.

Results:

Two successful DR test practice sessions were conducted and the team is preparing for a final test for the client.

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 to improve both agility and effectiveness in supporting emerging business process improvements and other organizational 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.

The client's San Diego, California, location was chosen for the primary production services to optimize the global end user experience by minimizing the network latency. The Chicago 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.

Collaborating for results

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

The two data centres of the client, San Diego and Chicago, act as DR sites 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 the 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

High-availability solution

HADR, a built-in feature of DB2, creates and maintains a fault tolerant replica of database. It provides alternative for delivering a 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 the primary database to make the production applications (SAP) available 24x7. This means that the production SAP application servers at SDDC are primary database boxes and are being backed up by using HADR feature of DB2 machines at CDC and the DR servers at CDC can be brought up with recent data restored 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 the overall consistency in the DR procedure, the CSC backup team conducts tests to correct the tech-procedures and process flow and show the readiness to face a disaster, and make the client aware of data protection.

CSC team defines project strategy

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 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 utilize its talented resource pool spread across the globe thereby enhancing the value delivered to its global customers.