DataMatters was aware that hosting its business critical services from a single site did not lend itself to effective disaster recovery planning. If the site went off-line then every one of its services would cease to function. The introduction of a disaster recovery solution has allowed DataMatters to plan ahead and focus its efforts on developing and growing its business, safe in the knowledge that the hosting infrastructure will be reliable, available and secure.
Business continuity is essential and fast recovery times to ensure minimal disruption to staff, clients and key IT systems are vital. According to the Federation of Small Businesses, 80% of businesses affected by a major incident close within 18 months and 90% of businesses that lose data from a disaster are forced to shut within 2 years.
By putting live IT systems within Zen’s colocation facility, DataMatters was able to reduce data network traffic bottlenecks at their main site, considerably improving performance. Furthermore it could failover these colocation live systems back to the primary site, providing an additional level of systems recovery.
As well as providing an answer to DataMatters disaster recovery problems, the Colocation facility has also allowed the company to design new IT systems with greater availability and reliability.
Zen has provided DataMatters with a dedicated cabinet in which they can host their hardware and connect to Zen’s resilient network, this means the standby infrastructure could spring into action at a moment’s notice, providing DataMatters with an effective disaster recovery plan which would significantly reduce systems downtime in the event of a failure at its primary site.
‘The introduction of a disaster recovery solution has allowed DataMatters to plan ahead and focus its efforts on developing and growing its business, safe in the knowledge that the hosting infrastructure will be reliable, available and secure’, said Andrew Saunders, Head of Product Management & Marketing.
‘The physical location is one that is away from the high risk city centre whilst being easy enough to reach when we need to get onsite’, said Bob Pickering, Network Manager, DataMatters Limited.
‘Having worked in partnership with Zen for many years, we knew that Zen could allow us the flexibility to tailor the solution to suit our exact requirements’, added Pickering.
Zen’s Colocation facility is situated in a secure data centre at Zen’s North West based Head Office. This service was created due to increasing demand from customers for more data centre space. It provides a cost-effective way of securely hosting customers’ mission critical IT infrastructure, together with providing reliable and fast Internet access.
Both shared and dedicated rack options are available from Zen to suit customers’ specific requirements. Shared racks are ideal if customers have a small amount of equipment, whereas dedicated racks provide more capacity with a lockable and private environment for the customer’s hardware.
Zen’s headquarters provide the ideal location for the data centre which is capable of holding over 1,000 servers. The centre is closely monitored around the clock by automated management systems, CCTV and onsite Security Guards. There are also stringent environmental controls and resilient power supplies in place to ensure that customers will always get the best performance from their hosted equipment.