Theme: Disaster Recovery
Location: Warwickshire
Tek-nology Solutions has worked with a UK-based motivation and incentives company since 2006, providing IT support on an ad hoc basis; the nature of this reactive contract relies upon the client to establish when there is a problem that needs to be addressed.
In January 2013, Tek-nology Solutions received a call from the organisation to advise of a hard drive failure with their HP Microsoft server. This was being used for file storage and Microsoft Exchange (Email).
RAID protection enabled the server to continue running without any loss to data whilst Tek-nology Solutions made contact with HP to order a replacement. However, during this 24-hour period, a second hard drive failed, resulting in business disruption and downtime.
Tek-nology Solutions organised for the second replacement hard drive. With now a more serious situation, Tek-nology Solutions’ expertise was required to rebuild the server partition and restore the data. The file data required a simple restore from tape. However, the Microsoft Exchange required a more complex recovery procedure involving a site visit and some additional remote work.
Tek-nology Solutions worked relentlessly to ensure the systems were back up and running in a timely manner.
The organisation’s realisation of a server hardware failure enabled Tek-nology Solutions to step in to resolve the situation. Following replacement of the hard drives, Tek-nology Solutions discussed the benefits to be gained of its Preventative Maintenance service.
Although this client had already subscribed to the third element of this service – ‘updates to software/firmware’, they had not opted in to the pro-active ‘alerting’ and ‘monitoring’ elements of this subscription. This seeks to ensure the appropriate response mechanisms are in place to pro-actively detect IT problems preventing the onset of more significant issues that lead to unplanned downtime and business interruption.