DATAFORT, the innovative developer of data protection managed services, today announced that the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre (QEIICC), the winner of the ‘Europe’s Leading Conference Centre’ award, is now relying on the provider’s fully managed services to ensure the company’s data availability and business continuity. By choosing to partner with DATAFORT, QEII now enjoys enterprise-grade service at SME prices. DATAFORT’s Critical Care high availability service allows organisations to protect their data and information systems at a fixed price without compromising on SLAs and with recovery from full system failure in just minutes.
With astonishing views, situated amongst the Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament, and with a turnover in 2009 of £11 million, QEII has been providing leading conference facilities for over 24 years. The venue prides itself on its business-supporting technologies
including E3 wireless 100 mbs Internet connectivity, sophisticated telephony and state-of-the-art communications equipment, including video conferencing, throughout its 2,000 square metres of space spread over seven floors.
Having successfully worked with DATAFORT for a number of years, in early 2010 QEII turned once again to the managed services provider to seek assistance with the design of a brand new business continuity strategy. Until then, tape backup was used as the primary recovery method with critical data being secured through DATAFORT’s offsite backup service. However the systems’ recovery time was too long for a seven-day-a-week, customer-facing organisation like QEII so IT administrator Alan Suppaya decided it was time to increase availability for the company’s five most critical servers. At the same time he opted to streamline and automate data backups for the remaining eight servers located throughout the building. He turned to DATAFORT to fulfil both requirements.
‘It was not profitable to devote time and resources to internally manage backups because we need to focus on the live systems,’ said Alan Suppaya, IT manager at QEII. ‘The DATAFORT Hi-5 approach to recovery from system failure not only turned a day-long process into a 15-minute exercise, it also limited data loss to 15 minutes prior to failure. The best tape could offer was to restore from the backup made the previous night, losing at least a day’s work. Switching to Hi-5 was a no brainer for us.’
Thanks to DATAFORT’s Hi-5 high availability service QEII has not only improved recovery speed of critical systems but also consolidated and automated the backup policy for the entire organisation. This is essential because the venue can host events seven days a week making any system downtime highly disruptive.
Thanks to the deployment of the Hi-5 high-availability service QEII now exceeds its board and management policies as it protects all its data both
locally on backup servers and in DATAFORT’s tier III remote data centres. File, folder, server or archive recovery are handled over the local network
and in the event of a disaster servers loaded with fully-functioning virtual servers are delivered to the customer’s temporary headquarters within one
business day from the reported disruption.
UPDATE:
DATAFORT wins the coveted Data Centre Solutions Award for the work we did to create a secure environment for QEIICC.
ABOUT DATAFORT
DataFort provides dependable secure off-site computer information storage with a focus on functionality and convenience for the end user. The company was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Guildford, UK and New York, USA. DataFort’s software and services are used by thousands of businesses worldwide – ranging from small SMEs and schools through to quoted companies and local government. Every hour of every day someone, somewhere backs up with DataFort. Contact the team at 0800 45 44 35 to discuss your security requirements with our team.