Case study: Parks Victoria inks deal with EMC and Global Storage

Parks Victoria's 1,000-strong workforce is charged with preserving these areas, including 3.96 million hectares of land constituting 17 percent of the state.

The challenge

Until 2005, the government statutory body relied on dated information infrastructure technology incorporating tape-based backup and minimal disaster recovery capabilities.

In late 2005, Parks Victoria commenced a comprehensive upgrade of its information infrastructure.

This included an evaluation of its ability to recover in the event of a significant interruption or business systems failure.

"We had a paper-based disaster recovery plan, but no actual disaster recovery hardware and we would have to pray that operating system or application CDs survived any event," said John Webster, infrastructure manager, Parks Victoria.

"If we were forced to rebuild our entire server, storage, personal computer, and networking environment, it would take us between three weeks and three months to complete."

Estates managed by Parks Victoria received more than 76.1 million visits in 2006-07 and many visitors camp and hike in renowned parks such as Wilsons Promontory.

The company relies heavily on online booking and point-of-sale systems to enable Victorians and visitors to access accommodation.

These systems are required to operate 24x7, and outages, particularly in busy periods, can frustrate users and compromise the workforce to deliver on its objectives.

It also relies on internal systems such as e-mail, Oracle Financials, Oracle Human Resources, and RSA security software to operate.

"Before the last two years, we had a few outages, which prompted our focus on business continuity," said Webster. "We could not afford to continue to have these difficulties."

In addition, Parks Victoria needed to ensure continued compliance with financial reporting requirements imposed by the state Auditor-General.

"The A-G requires us to undertake certain disaster recovery tasks twice a year to ensure we can restore information," added Webster.

"They would ask us to retrieve two e-mails and two transactions undertaken within the past year.

"Using our tape-based backup, it would take us several days at a time. We were not happy with this and wanted to bring the time back down to one day."

"The Global Storage solution based on EMC infrastructure meets all our requirements. If there is a business continuity interruption, they take responsibility for getting our servers back up and running," said Webster.

The solution

Implementing a Managed Disaster Recovery Solution, the Parks Victoria information technology team set about stabilising the organisation's infrastructure.

Disaster recovery emerged as a key priority. Parks Victoria also realised it had to develop an archiving strategy to reduce data volumes and ensure retained data was stored efficiently and effectively.

A year and a half after commencing the project, Parks Victoria released a tender seeking an outsourced disaster recovery solution to provide end-to-end business continuity and offsite storage capabilities to its primary facility.

"We had eight companies submit expressions of interest to provide the solution and this was reduced to three," said Webster.

"We selected managed services provided by Global Storage as they met all of our requirements for a complete disaster recovery solution with the added bonus of a managed backup service.

"The Global Storage solution provided a secondary site, ongoing management, 24x7 support, and a stringent service level agreement around recovery time."

Parks Victoria implemented the solution in October 2007.

Global Storage is servicing the contract using its DataReady Remote Data Backup Service and the EnvironmentReady Environment Replication Service.

DataReady replaces internal tape systems with an automated remote server backup and EnvironmentReady ensures recovery of data and applications at the Global Storage offsite data centre.