Luminous readies itself for disaster contingencies by implementing IBM’s cloud-based server recovery solution
By Heena Jhingan
“A stitch in time saves nine” was perhaps the very thought that prompted the power back-up solution provider Luminous to invest in a disaster recovery solution. The company that claims to be striving for performance beyond compliance was on the look out for a DR solution not for the sake of audit purposes, but in order to stay better prepared for possible business disruptions.
Until recently, DR capabilities were available mostly to large enterprises. But they are now within bounds for even small and medium enterprises like Luminous as well.
According to Chander Khanduja, CIO, Luminous, the need for uninterrupted business operations has become crucial for enterprises to ensure enhanced customer engagement and protect critical business data.
“Our intent to deploy the solution was clear right from the beginning, we never wanted a solution for the sake for it, instead we needed a robust solution to rely on for recovery of critical applications,” he says.
Khanduja believes that the market is full of disaster recovery solution options, but to find the right one to meet the specific requirement can be challenging. So at Luminous, they defined their requirements and set three important parameters based on which they would choose a solution.
“In our sector, we are a strong player in terms of presence and brand name, and we could rely on a vendor that was equally strong,” he says, adding that they wanted a solution that was opex-based and easy to deploy. “IBM’s SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery (VSR) seemed to offer most of everything that was on our list,” he says.
Luminous considered three other players in the market that offered DR in various forms — DR on a dedicated model, on premise and cloud. However, since DR as a service was a Luminous’ priority, they decided to go with IBM’s solution.
Preparing for disaster
Luminous moved most of its critical applications including ERP, CRM, bar coding and financial systems on the IBM solution and at present, it has eight servers running on DR.
Traditionally, setting up DR has not been such a simple thing as it was in the case of Luminous. Khanduja explains that in many cases, the applications need to deployed all over again, but with the IBM solution they did not have to do any of that.
He feels that IBM VSR is a complete disaster recovery service package that helped them to not only provision recovery resources in minutes but also avoid errors associated with manual operations.
“The recovery was seamless and we could continue with our business operations without any disruption; there was no downtime required at the primary site,” he elaborates.
Generally, in a DR set up the Recovery Point Objective (the maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident) and Recovery Time Objective (the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster or disruption) can be very high. In some cases the RTOs could go up to 2-3 hours, which is not a good thing for businesses, more so if it’s about mission critical applications. However, the IBM solution delivered much lower RTOs as compared to the other solutions that Luminous had considered, says Khanduja.
He adds the IBM VSR service helped them improve server recovery time and reliability. Luminous leveraged the automation and cloud tools offered by the service to minimize the risk of failure due to disparate hardware at the production data center.
Khanduja feels since the solution provides remote portal access, the managers can monitor and manage the RPOs and RTOs through it, this helps businesses reduce cost and time as well as the inconvenience of traveling to the recovery site and bring in greater efficiency in the long run.
Expanding the cover
Luminous now plans to expand its DR footprint. The company’s IT team will be focused on devising plans that can help them take more applications onto the DR setup.
Khanduja informs that they are constantly working on ramping up their customer facing application to offer better user experience and service.
“We are experimenting with new capabilities and mobile based applications; we will have more customer centric applications being moved to the DR environment,” he says.
One thing that Khanduja is certain about is that DR for them is going to remain cloud-based, as it saves opex, which makes the implementation cost-effective. More importantly, it is faster, easier to deploy and saves the IT manager the botheration about heterogeneous hardware in the IT structure.
