30 January 2014

Business environment:

• Develops and manufactures health products
• Operates around the clock and under stringent regulations
• The company must demonstrate full business continuity plans
• Virtual infrastructure is supporting delivery of mission-critical applications

Vision Solutions product:

• Double-Take Availability

Implementation Team:

• Frontier Technology

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies offers process development and drug manufacturing facilities and services, working with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to help them develop and manufacture a broad range of innovative products to improve human and animal health.

As one of the world’s leading contract manufacturing organisations for the biopharmaceutical industry, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies has to meet stringent industry regulations and client requirements for business continuity. When the company implemented a virtual data centre it looked to optimise its recovery point and time objectives with a real-time replication DR solution.

Business challenge

Business continuity is of upmost importance to Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies. As a manufacturer of pharmaceutical products the firm must show that they have a disaster recovery plan in place. Furthermore, the impact of unscheduled downtime would affect profitability and require more investment in order to deal with the aftermath.

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies recently moved its data centre to its manufacturing facility in Billingham, UK and completely redesigned its infrastructure to incorporate both physical and virtual (VMware) environments, as not all applications are supported by the application provider on a virtual platform. With their existing “ship-to-site” disaster recovery (DR) contract coming to an end, the challenge was to find a solution that provided DR for both the physical and virtual worlds while improving Recovery Time Objectives. 

“We know that recovery in the event of a system or location incident is only as good as the last backup that has been taken. Looking at the options, approaches based on snapshots or scheduled backups would leave us with a hole in our data that would be unacceptable. When we understood the significant benefit we could gain from real-time protection in reducing not only our target recovery time objective but also recovery point objective , we were compelled to find a best-fit solution that would include this,” said Campbell Kay, IT & ASV Manager of Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, Billingham.

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies had a number of mission critical applications and considerable data that needed to be protected in the event of a disaster. Research and manufacture  relies on access to several key applications, including SAP for managing materials, manufacturing and production processes, chromatography systems that handle product analysis and several web applications. The organisation relies heavily on email for both internal and external communication, and must retain data supporting pharmaceutical research and manufacturing for a minimum of 10 years.

Solution

After comparing a number of disaster recovery solutions, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies selected Frontier Continuity Service, a private cloud DR service from Vision Solutions’ partner Frontier Technology. It provides real-time replication and ensures high availability (HA) and DR for the company’s critical applications, without the need for a second DR site.

Taking a phased approach to moving over to the new system, initially Frontier Continuity Service provided protection for the company’s email system, file server, external facing DNS server and domain.  The second phase expanded cover to the company’s SAP ECC production systems, while the third phase focused on the company’s chromatography data and electronic document management systems.

“Frontier Continuity Service is based on Double-Take Availability. The solution is simple to implement and the DR-as-a-service approach has delivered significant cost benefits. There is no upfront spend on hardware required from us, and there are minimal management overheads.  We simply have a predictable rental model of payment,” said Kay. “We have developed a great relationship with Frontier Technology and have already seen how much easier it is to run DR trials and tests. The Frontier team has helped us implement and test our new DR process quickly and efficiently,” added Kay.

Frontier Continuity Service uses Double-Take Availability to replicate Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies servers to the Frontier cloud service, located at its secure data centre.  Double-Take Availability continuously monitors and replicates changes made to open files as they occur. It automatically and rapidly copies the changes to the remote site, where secondary servers running on the Frontier Continuity Service cloud. In the event of a production system being disrupted or taken offline for maintenance users can be quickly switched to the secondary server and carry on as normal.

Conclusion

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies has realised the benefits of real-time replication from Vision Solutions across its virtual and Windows environments.  “We have been able to reduce our Recovery Time Objective from days to a couple of hours and our Recovery Point Objective from 24 hours to just 2 hours,” stated Kay. “Frontier Continuity Service, backed by Double-Take Availability has proved a winning choice for our business.”