A leading international steel supplier and manufacturer with headquarters in Kansas City and operating across Canada, Mexico, and the United States, recently partnered with Stage2Data to upgrade its backup and disaster recovery solution to state-of-the-art DRaaS and failover. Employing more than 2,000 employees, backed by 7 manufacturing facilities, and backing up approximately 70 terabytes of data, Stage2Data was also retained to assist with the future migration of its DRaaS solution to SD-WAN.
The challenges and Objectives
In 2019, a manufacturer of engineered building solutions found Stage2Data during its search for disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) alternatives.. While considering their options, they debated whether to upgrade their in-house data center with full disaster recovery (DR) and failover capabilities or leasing physical data center space from a service provider.
After a thorough analysis, they found that revitalizing their data center and leasing space was not economically feasible when compared to integrating a managed DRaaS solution. Over a few months, they evaluated three different DRaaS providers before ultimately choosing Stage2Data due to its ability to meet their needs, ease of collaboration, and the solution’s effectiveness.
Realizing that they cannot keep up a manual and partial software solution, the steel supplier and manufacturer onboarded Stage2Data to set them up with robust and reliable DRaaS and failover solution.
Before partnering with Stage2Data, the construction engineering company used partial, passive failover between themselves and one of their office locations in Memphis. Only critical servers were virtualized, and they had a backup solution backing up regional and core office equipment only.
The solution
As mentioned, one of the draw cards to move to Stage2Data was their ability to replicate the manufacturer’s entire infrastructure, including local network and servers as well as cloud based virtual machines to a secure, privately hosted data center.
Unlike other DR providers, this solution can failover all data and servers leaving the local and private IPs unchanged. In the case of a disruptive event, this means seamless failover without having to re-IP which means all online services will continue to run as normal with minimal downtime.
The leading steel supplier and manufacturer now uses Stage2Data for multiple business units and back up close to 300 servers. They run full Stage2Data DRaaS on their data center, with 90% of their infrastructure now being virtual. Additionally, they have a robust VDI and virtual app environment that is part of the DRaaS solution that we manage for them. This includes their business-critical financial and HR services where minimal downtime is crucial during a disruption or disaster.
Results
Throughout the onboarding process, Stage2Data’s support team worked closely with the manufacturer, providing timely responses and assistance in troubleshooting any issues that arose. Critical applications and network failover with Zerto were successfully tested, ensuring that the company’s entire infrastructure can be quickly and smoothly transferred to Stage2Data’s environment in case of a disaster or disruptive event.
They currently implement network failover with a virtual firewall and will be transitioning from MPLS to SD-WAN using virtual devices. The next phase involves migrating their DRaaS solution to the SD-WAN environment and testing it during the transition process.
The steel supplier and manufacturer has been extremely satisfied with their experience working with Stage2Data. They were particularly impressed with our professionalism, responsiveness, and willingness to go above and beyond. This made us a trusted partner for their DRaaS needs.
“Stage2Data has been fantastic and an invaluable technology partner. They still meet with us weekly for test exercises, walking us through everything and staying heavily involved. Their above-and-beyond support makes us feel comfortable and confident that they can handle any IT, security or disruptive event that may happen. The team regularly reaches out to check on our progress, offering suggestions to enhance our cloud environment and potential new opportunities. They even share insights gathered from attending our DRaaS events, providing expertise on various systems. Overall, our relationship with Stage2Data has been exceptional and we can recommend them without reservation”
