Public Housing Authority Develops a State-of-the-Art Disaster Recovery Program

Headquartered in West Valley City, Utah, the Utah Housing Corporation (UHC) is a publicly held organization created in 1975 by state legislators to provide mortgage loans to low and moderate ­income home buyers, and to financially support developers building or renovating affordable apartments for the people of Utah.

In April 2016, UHC lacked a disaster recovery program for its primary computing resources, which consisted of physical and virtual Windows® systems and IBM® i LPARs. Although UHC was using Carbonite® _ EVault™ to back-up their data locally and to the cloud, it did not have a recovery data center or redundant hardware that could be used to restore its data and resume business operations in a timely and reliable fashion. In the event of a disaster it could have taken weeks to bring their applications back on line.

Recovery Point’s partner Sirius analyzed UHC’s IT environment, established minimum recovery-point and recovery-time objectives, and engineered a solution to meet those objectives. The solution powered by Recovery Point included coverage for all of UHC’s disaster risks as well as convenient on-site file restoration capabilities. The full, end-to-end solution included a needs analysis, solution design and engineering, on­-site implementation, onboarding, training, proof-of­-concept testing and runbooks. All the testing was accomplished remotely, eliminating travel costs for UHC’s participating IT staff.

• 38+ TB (usable) of on-site SAN storage for local Veeam© backups
• Replication of physical and virtual Windows systems backups to the Recovery Point Cloud
• On-demand cloud infrastructure for restoration of physical and virtual Windows systems
• Local backups of IBM Power SystemsTM servers to a Dell® EMC Data Domain appliance
• Replication of IBM i backup data to a second Data Domain appliance at Recovery Point
• On-demand Power Systems hardware for restoration of two IBM i LPARs
• A redundant multi-protocol label switching {MPLS) connection to UHC’s background financial services provider

The UHC IT team now has a state-of-the-art DRaaS program in place to ensure that a successful recovery can be completed and the organization can continue to operate even if its environment has been impacted by a disaster. A successful test of the overall solution achieved rapid recovery of Veeam backup data in the Recovery Point cloud, and full restoration of IBM i functionality using the target­-side Data Domain and Recovery Point IBM i infrastructure. Following the initial deployment, Veeam licenses were added for additional local server backup-only services. These servers are backed-up locally to disk and then replicated off­site on a nightly basis to Recovery Point’s Cloud Backup as a Service (BaaS) infrastructure, where the data will be periodically saved to tape. This disk-to­-disk-to-tape service allows UHC to quickly restore files and folders from the local repository as well as archiving data to tape to reduce storage costs.