​Hardware Failure - Part 2

Hardware fails for many reasons from lightning to old age.  So, what can we do when the inevitable happens?  Do we pay the employees during the downtime or close temporarily?  Do we have the budget to buy two of everything?  How long is this going to take!?

Woosah!  There are solutions you can put in place now to keep you running.

Technology today allows you to run entirely in the cloud from anywhere regardless of device, but for some this may not be a solution.  In Part 1 we mentioned a company that stored working data on a server which failed and crippled their business.  After the server was repaired, we were asked to come up with a solution so they would not experience that downtime again.

For this company a cloud solution wasn’t an option since their company files are large drawings of buildings and other structures.  Working on those files in a hybrid environment (onsite and cloud) wouldn’t have provided the best experience due to file size, and internet bandwidth consumption.  Additionally, the customer requested an on-premise solution since the internet can sometimes be unavailable.

For this task we decided to create a Hyper-V Replica setup between two servers onsite.  In the event of a failure on the primary server, a fail-over of the production workloads to the Replica secondary server would occur.  While options are available regarding frequency of replication, it was decided to set replication for every 5 minutes to minimize the amount of work lost in the event of another failure.

To sweeten the deal, we were able to re-purpose a server that was being replaced with a cloud solution.  We replaced all the hard drives and updated the operating system since the rest of the hardware was not outdated.  This allowed us to create a solution that was 35% less expensive than the next comparable solution.

For this customer, having hardware redundancy is a must since the company relies so much on the local server.  A hybrid cloud solution wouldn’t provide the best experience due to bandwidth and file size.  Lastly, an entirely hosted environment wasn’t within budget.  While multiple solutions exist to keep your company running smoothly through a hardware failure, finding the best fit is the challenge.

Contact us today for help finding a solution that meet your technology needs.