Building a cloud-based disaster recovery platform to handle the future

Tutt Bryant Group is an established Australian construction and heavy equipment firm founded in 1938, and headquartered in Sydney. Today its operations include providing logistical support, crane and specialised transport hire for lifting and shifting projects, selling and servicing construction equipment, and hiring equipment for earthmoving, civil construction, rail maintenance, industrial, trade and DIY uses. Major projects include transporting and installing infrastructure for the Victorian Desalination Plant and Sydney’s Salt Pan Creek railway underbridge.

The Challenge

Tutt Bryant’s ICT infrastructure was reaching its end of life, and they were looking for new opportunities to futureproof their business. Customer data is vital to Tutt Bryant’s operations, and they were especially focused on building more robust backup and disaster recovery systems. The focus was not just keeping their day-to-day operational and customer data secure, but fully recoverable, quickly, in the event of disaster. 

The business was looking for an up-to-date integrated system across all its Australian locations and departments, while also simplifying its partner relationships. They wanted a single partner running the project end-to-end, with the expertise to not only provide an easily accessible central support network, but tailored specifically for Tutt Bryant’s unique business operations. 

The Datacom difference

Datacom’s Professional Services team started work with Tutt Bryant in June 2016. This initial engagement evolved into six months of consulting, designing and implementing a total end-to-end solution that met the customer’s rigorous data protection standards. It began with the installation of new Dell-EMC servers, running a VMware hypervisor, Nimble Storage arrays, on Cisco networking infrastructure. This was to run across all of Tutt Bryant’s data centre facilities and disaster recovery sites across Australia. 

Datacom also created a secure backup system built on CommVault, and managed the migration of Tutt Bryant’s applications onto the new platform. This included using Zerto to manage the failover within the Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution. Both of these systems are provided on flexible, commercial terms, to suit the way Tutt Bryant wants to buy their services.

Post project completion, Datacom ran full disaster recovery tests for the customer, which as part of the contract will now be an annual process. The company’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO) dropped from days, to just four hours. 

Beyond the build itself, Datacom was the perfect partner to provide ongoing support services, regular maintenance and testing, and consulting across all of Tutt Bryant’s locations. 

Performance wise, reports that were taking more than 90 seconds to run, have dropped to 10 seconds – a significant efficiency upgrade.

Tutt Bryant’s systems are now not only easier to operate, but are significantly simpler, more robust, and more efficient. Dealing with a single partner, providing a single service end-to-end, has not only produced a high quality, scalable solution, but taken the workload off Tutt Bryant’s internal ICT teams. Their vital data is not only safer and easier to access on their cloud platform, but future-proofed to scale with the business as it grows.