vmhosts

The Helping Hand Company

Disaster Recovery as a Service

VMhosts engaged to design and implement on-premise virtual infrastructure for The Helping Hand Company alongside providing DRaaS.

 

Helping Hand LogoThe Helping Hand Company is a British manufacturing company who specialise in Independent Living at home, Pressure Ulcer Management, 24hour Postural Care and Litter Management consultancy. They design, test, manufacture and sell a range of revolutionary products alongside supporting their customers over the lifetime of their purchases with their own service department and nationwide network of service engineers.

The Requirement:

The Helping Hand Company were deploying a new ERP system which required additional resource and dedicated All Flash storage pool to provide the required performance for the new ERP system and run their existing virtual machines.

As well as providing increased performance and availability to systems locally, The Helping Hand Company also required offsite Disaster Recovery to protect against the increasing number of threats including ransomware. The Disaster Recovery solution was needed to provide frequent recovery points (RPO’s) with a low Recovery Time (RTO).

The Solution:

VMhosts were engaged to design and implement a new on-premise virtual infrastructure for the new ERP system. The first class DRaaS that VMhosts can offer gave The Helping Hands Company a site to recover to which fitted their RTO.

3 ESXi hosts were installed each with a single 32 core AMD processor which not only reduced initial hardware costs but also ongoing licensing costs.

The latest EPYC AMD family processors also protect against threats such as Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities announced by Intel in 2018, providing additional security without overheads which can be as much as 25% on similar Intel branded CPU’s.

VMhosts recommended a HPE dual controller Fibre Channel storage system. Providing two pools of storage, a dedicated Tier 1 Flash array was provisioned for the ERP system. A second pool of storage using a mix of Tier 1 Flash and Tier 2 SAS provided fast performing storage with capacity within the customer’s budget.

Existing hardware was re-utilised where possible to reduce costs and associated E waste.
Following the system build and testing production, work loads were migrated to the new environment while minimising interruption to less than 1 hour.

To meet the RPO and RTO requirements of the business, VMhosts protected virtual machines using Zerto. Using Zerto meant virtual machines could be replicated offsite near-synchronously. Zerto’s built in journaling technology provides externally granular recovery points, allowing recovery to very specific points in time minimising any data loss in the event of hardware failure, or malicious activity such as ransomware attacks on the network.

In the event of a disaster recovery of virtual machines, this is fully orchestrated by Zerto. Customer virtual machines are powered on in a few moments and accessible via the self-service portal.
VMhosts Disaster Recovery service powered by Zerto is fully managed and covered by our 24/7/365 P1 SLA, with engineers on hand to help work through planned and unplanned DR scenarios.

Result:

The Helping Hand Company are now running their new ERP system on a virtualised on-premise infrastructure designed and implemented by VMhosts. Existing hardware has been utilised wherever possible to minimise costs and the addition of a single 32 core AMD processor not only provided a licence cost saving, but also the flexibility for future proofing. Our DRaaS provides the peace of mind that their data is safe, secure and always accessible.

‘It is rare to find a company with such a high level of technical skill coupled with excellent communications skills. From first specification through implementation to support, VMhosts are a pleasure to deal with.’ 

Matt Hatcher, The Helping Hand Company

 

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CompanyThe Helping Hand Company

ServiceDisaster Recovery as a Service

Key Challenges:

  • Provide additional computer and storage capacity.
  • Improve availability and performance of critical applications.
  • Minimise security risks.
  • Improve the experience for end users.

Solution:

  • HPE AMD Servers.
  • HPE Storage Solution.
  • Setup and migration consultancy.
  •  Zerto
  •  Veeam

Key Challenges:

  • Reduced hardware and licensing costs.
  • Protecting against Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.
  • Fast performing storage.
  • Frequent RPO with a low RTO.
  • DRaaS managed by our 24/7/365 team of engineers.