Global Investment Company outsources replication with Recovery Point’s Resiliency Management Platform (RMP)

The client is a fund company dedicated to achieving superior returns for its investors over time. The company has a history of offering investment management services to corporations, institutions and high net worth individuals for more than 27 years. Currently, the company manages various long/short equity strategies, mutual funds and managed accounts.

In the financial services industry, system down-time is taboo. The client’s IT Director is under constant pressure to ensure the company’s elite team of investment professionals experience continuous access to critical data and applications, with the ability to share investment recommendations with investors and colleagues from around the world, at the same time adhering to key compliance regulations.

The client team of portfolio managers, analysts and traders rely on a complex network of web subscriptions and quote systems to remain current on investment trends. For example, email is critical to communicating time-sensitive investment information, both within the firm and to clients. “Email is our life line,” said the IT Director. “We are looking at millions of dollars per minute, if our email were to go down.”

Steady growth had begun to tax the company’s technology infrastructure. “We had really outgrown our systems,” said the IT Director. “They had been patched together and were not scalable. We were experiencing issues with our phone system, as well as network downtime, and sometimes emails just went missing.” He elected to completely revamp the company’s IT infrastructure. Phone, email, and networking resources were upgraded to reflect the company’s growing demand for continuous access to data and applications. Recovery of data remained a concern, however. Initially, the company relied on tape backups, but these proved problematic. “One of the issues with tape back-up is simply time to restore,” said their IT Director. “Also, data is only as current as the most recent back-up, and there are limited options for reliably moving data off-site so that it’s properly protected.” Collocation was an alternative worth exploring. “I began to consider hosting our applications at a data center, and providing and managing the computer hardware to go with it. Although the technology seemed sound, the solution involved complicated clustering and a lot of expense. “On the hosting side, I worried about losing control over our applications, and experiencing degradation in functionality. Hosting often means a lot of restrictions, and little information about where data is actually backed-up.” Server virtualization addressed some of the IT Director’s concerns about cost and complexity. “I had found a data center I liked, and was considering using CA’s XOsoft data replication product to mirror our applications off-site, but I had not worked with virtualization before and wasn’t really comfortable.

As the IT Director was working through the machinations of building his own solution, he learned of Recovery Point, a company that offered a SaaS-based IT Resiliency Orchestration platform, the Resiliency Management Platform. “We researched the components of the Recovery Point RMP platform and realized we were on to something,” he said. “The combination of CA’s XOsoft product with Recovery Point’s ITRO capabilities meant a host-based system for assuring our critical technology infrastructure – including all Windows-based file and application servers – were available without interruption, even in the case of a critical system failure.”

“The Recovery Point RMP allowed us to outsource all the headaches around replication,” said the client’s IT Director. “We could just set it and forget it. Plus I was spared the ordeal of managing multiple sites, with all the associated costs. Instead, Recovery Point offered me enterprise-grade business continuity at a reasonable price.” Deployment was fast and easy. “We set up our critical servers – the main controller, active directory, file and Exchange servers in just a few days. When we engaged in a test failover of the active directory, everything worked seamlessly. Our users had no clue we had failed over. It was business as usual.” The client has plans to add more servers in the near future, and is already experiencing a tremendous return on investment. “When I factor in the cost of software licensing, hardware purchases, extra bandwidth and power requirements associated with the collocation scenario, it’s clear the Recovery Point RMP service paid for itself within the first year”, said the client. “Better still, this environment is built for scalability. I’ve built a network I believe will carry us to the next level of growth, and Recovery Point can keep up with us.”