24/7 Uptime and Marathon Technologies are best of breed for leading livestock farm

A leading animal breeding farm has trusted 24/7 Uptime and Marathon everRun MX Extend to provide local availability and protect its business critical ERP system from downtime and disaster.

The organisation has a global breeding operation with livestock located all over the world. This generates considerable revenue for the business so breeding history, financial and contractual data are carefully documented.

The farm has created and developed its own ERP system that now contains almost 30 years’ worth of bloodline and breeding history. This data is a core business application. It would be very time-consuming and almost impossible to reproduce.

With a global breeding operation in four different continents and time zones, the ERP system is constantly in use. Therefore 24/7 access is vital. Downtime would compromise revenue opportunities and reputation with their valuable client base.

The ERP system is stored on a SQL server. The farm was already using a basic version of Marathon everRun protection when the IT Manager learned about the introduction of everRun MX Extend in Autumn 2010. He then contacted 24/7 Uptime to learn more about the functionality and benefits everRun MX Extend could provide to his business.

everRun MX Extend builds upon everRun fault tolerant SMP/multi-core application availability software by providing disaster recovery (DR) protection between remote locations. This powerful combination of local availability and DR is an end-to-end solution which provides added protection from catastrophic failure by capturing and asynchronously replicating application data across geographic distances in real time.

Local issues such as disk failure or network card outage are addressed locally, so minimising disruption to the business caused by DR failover. Only complete site outages invoke a full disaster recovery failover.

The IT Manager explains: “Our ERP system is a core business application so it mustn’t stop working – ever! In the past we used another solution but suffered downtime problems every month. That’s why we moved to the Marathon solution and it has served us well. Just recently, one of our servers failed but Marathon took over seamlessly. It was just as our colleagues from another time zone came online but they didn’t notice any difference to usual operations.”

He continues: “The snapshotting feature provides a real added benefit to our business. As a 24/7 operation, we cannot afford business interruption. Now we can create a snapshot on a live machine at our DR site and test our data. We undertake this test every six months and then simply delete the test when complete.”

The farm has another site less than five miles away from their headquarters and that is being used as their disaster recovery site. The IT Manager hasn’t used the MX Extend disaster recovery package but has trialled some elements. He agrees: “It’s easy and simple to use. We undertook an exercise that we expected would take a few hours – but it literally took 10 minutes. We hope we never need to use the DR element but it’s really reassuring to know it’s there if we need it.”