Helping Simon Roofing Address RTO and RPO Disaster Recovery Needs
TierPoint helps Simon Roofing deploy a solution to address recovery point and recovery time objectives and help protect them from unexpected disruptions.
Introduction
Simon Roofing is a 123-year-old nationwide commercial roofing company that manufactures approximately 90-95% of its own material. A company with that kind of longevity understands the importance of doing what is necessary to keep the business viable. When the new Chief Information Officer realized the previous disaster recovery (DR) solution was not meeting expectations, Simon Roofing knew they had to make a change.
Challenges
While Simon Roofing hadn't experienced significant downtime or data loss, the new CIO, Kevin Rast, had seen firsthand what it can do to a company. He knew they needed a reliable DR solution so that if a disaster did occur, they would be able to keep the company operating.
The previous DR solution was more of an offsite backup solution. It wasn't the kind of system that would make it easy to recover quickly. Simon Roofing knew they needed always-on replication and the ability to failover and retrieve data quickly. They also wanted to have their DR environment close enough to be able to drive to it, but far enough away that falling victim to the same natural disaster would be highly unlikely.
The company didn't have any specific compliance requirements to meet, but the CIO came from a SOX-compliant organization and wanted to base their systems on that standard.
Solutions
With their primary production site in Ohio hosting their critical operations, they chose to host their DR environment in Nashville. Simon Roofings was looking for geographical diversity with redundancy in a location on a separate power grid.
Speed and accuracy is what TierPoint and Zerto delivered. Instead of the new DR environment taking a week to get replicated, with Zerto and TierPoint, it takes about an hour depending on the size of the data. "We've got some big servers and it's never taken more than 3 or 4 hours to get those up and running," said Michael Lindeman, IT Operations Manager.
Simon Roofing also completed annual DR testing in January. With that, they were able to verify that their data was being replicated and was in tact. The test also confirmed that they could validate the domain controller, boot up their servers, log in, and see that the data they needed was available.
Results
With a new DR solution, Simon Roofing wanted to be prepared for any and all kinds of disasters that might hit. They realized that the unexpected nature of disasters underscores the importance of preparing for them in this way.
Early in the process, one thing that stood out to Simon Roofing was the high quality of TierPoint's Nashville data center. They were already sold on the location, but after visiting the data center and seeing how the cages were secure and segmented, they felt confident that they'd be moving into a "top-notch" data center.
The major standouts, however, were speed and accuracy of the Managed Zerto solution. Getting everything added to Zerto was a smooth process for the client.
"Everything was replicated in one day basically, and we did the testing of our replications also in one day," said Kevin Rast. The recovery speed and accuracy, confirmed in the annual test, have given Simon Roofing the confidence to know that they will be able to recover from any disaster.
At A Glance
Industry
Roofing & Manufacturing
Technology
Disaster Recovery as a Service with Zerto
Challenges
With Simon Roofing's previous Disaster Recovery solution not living up to expectations, they had to find something that could meet their recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). They wanted to feel confident they could keep the business viable during any disaster.
Solution
Managed Zerto and a DR environment in Nashville have given the client a failback location they can count on in a geographically distinct location from their primary site.
Results
After a recent test of the DR solution in January, Simon Roofing has added confidence that the environment will work if and when the company faces unexpected disruptions.
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