ERP Disaster Recovery Solution on AWS

A longtime leader in golf equipment and apparel needed to find an alternative disaster recovery solution for a new ERP system.

Finding itself with a number of legacy IT systems, the company was looking to upgrade their infrastructure in a number of areas. With an upcoming planned elimination of a corporate disaster recovery support platform, IT management saw an opportunity to investigate alternative solutions for their DR requirements.

“We wanted to upgrade our disaster-recovery capabilities in order to mitigate the chance of data loss in our mission-critical, enterprise resource planning or ERP system,” said the Director of Infrastructure and Services.

“We were looking at the concept of continuous data protection in both our onsite production and DR environments,” he added. The company also wanted to incorporate newer technology, which would allow for quickly scaling memory size, CPU and disk space – without having to purchase incremental hardware.

While they were using nightly backup and data replication for disaster recovery, the company envisioned a solution with a lower recovery point objective (RPO) through continuous replication. They required a best-of-breed disaster recovery environment to match the 99.99 percent uptime of their new Oracle ERP solution.

The planned elimination of a legacy DR platform provided an opportunity to modernize.

“From the very beginning, we were talking about instances and hourly costs. This was an entirely different approach from the colocation options we explored earlier.”

The Solution

To achieve their vision of a scalable DR environment, the company needed to look beyond colocation. Our experts helped the company focus on finding a suitable DR as a Service and cloud solution.

“For a long time, we did not think our requirements would work with Amazon. We required private networking and multiple nodes to be replicated synchronously, that seemed to defy implementation at a public cloud provider,” said the director of infrastructure and services.

To facilitate disaster recovery of its ERP database, the company decided on an Oracle Limited disaster recovery optimized solution. “We learned that the Oracle Limited solution was available to us at no cost when in sleep or standby state.”

AWS is an authorized cloud platform for Oracle — one of a very small number of approved cloud vendors.

It was the flexibility and willingness to share its operations expertise that attracted the company  to effectual’s team. “From the very beginning, we were talking about instances and hourly costs. This was an entirely different approach from the colocation options we explored earlier.”

An economical cloud-based, disaster-recovery environment offering the potential to do more with less.

The company deployed the architecture for its disaster recovery platform on Amazon Web Services. “We can even move between various Amazon data centers if needed for changing protection requirements – without incurring any data transfer charges.”

The Effectual team was able to build a custom, and cost-effective, DR environment harnessing the power of AWS. The company had a highly specific use case for the deployment of cloud resources for disaster recovery in an AWS environment. It was an ideal opportunity for Effectual to architect and secure an optimized solution at scale.