The Challenge
As a not-for-profit provider of retirement accommodation and aged care services throughout Queensland and New South Wales, RSL Care needed a robust disaster recovery solution to protect the information of the 25,000 Australians it serves each year in the case of an outage, disaster or other event.
RSL Care also had three infrastructure stacks servicing different requirements in its data centre. Through a new disaster recovery solution, the organisation wanted to reduce its data centre storage footprint to save money and maximise the environment’s efficiency over five years.
The Solution
RSL Care and Datacom had successfully partnered on projects for the organisation in the past so solid foundations had been laid – Datacom understood RSL Care’s core business and unique requirements. However, the organisation still went to market to select an IT partner for this key disaster recovery project. Following a robust review process, it chose Datacom.
RSL Care knew our team’s specialised insight into its work would ensure direct access to business leaders and technical leads throughout the project.
RSL Care selected the FlexPod a solution as it brings together a range of solutions into a single-architecture data centre platform. Part of the FlexPod’s uniqueness is that it lets IT integrators build customised data centre solutions for clients; this enabled Datacom to provide a bespoke solution to the organisation.
Datacom consolidated RSL Care’s three storage stacks into one and we created a second data centre to serve as the disaster recovery site. While the FlexPod integration was seamless, our Datacom team had a few challenges setting up the additional data centre. It involved seven different design documents and did not allow for any down time between executing the existing data centre storage environment and the new one. This meant the disaster recovery project had to temporarily integrate the existing storage setup into the new one to keep everything running.
Within six months, RSL Care had realised the disaster recovery benefits, including a streamlined backup environment through the adoption of a consolidated management console. Additional benefits such as a reduction in storage due to deduplication and increased data centre utilisation were also achieved.
“In our business case, we stated we wanted to reduce the time it took to do backups – we did that. We have also reduced our dependencies on tape for backup. We were using it nightly, and it’s now just weekly or monthly. We also wanted to increase resilience, and we have done so through the second data centre site.”
Ian Youngson - Technology Manager, RSL Care