Financial


Investment Management: Disaster Recovery


The Profile
The company is a research-intensive investment fund firm with several offices on both coasts of the United States. It has more than $10 billion under management in more than twenty investment funds and is one of the largest hedge fund firms in the U.S.


The Goal
With millions of dollars at stake with every minute of downtime, the investment firm had a mandate for nonstop access to its business information stored in the Microsoft® SQL Server database, Microsoft® Exchange and various file servers.


After the tragic events of September 11th, the company urgently wanted to implement an IT infrastructure with end-to-end high availability and a disaster recovery plan based on replicating mission-critical data periodically amongst its several data centers.


Moreover, the company's existing environment had over a terabyte of distributed storage direct-attached to its many application servers. This was becoming increasingly time consuming for administrators to backup, restore, and provision additional disk space on-demand (in real time.) With its data almost doubling every year due to copious business transactions, influx of new clients, and the accumulation of research data, the future looked overwhelming, scheduling downtime to accommodate the expansion of disk capacity was a constant challenge.


The Solution
In partnership with storage technology vendors, the company architected two highly available, easily manageable Fibre Channel SANs (one in New York, one in another state) that replicated between each other across IP. At each site, the transaction-oriented application servers are connected to their respective SANs by Fibre Channel, while others are connected via IP to leverage the existing Gigabyte Ethernet infrastructure.


The Benefits
The software solution delivered on the investment firm's chronic imperative for non-stop data availability and immediate recoverability while solving its requirement for simplified storage management with seamless, boundless scalability.