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Case Study – High Availability Applications and Services
A study by Zetta Research, 54% of organizations reported that they have encountered downtime on a single occasion, enduring over 8 hours leading to significant revenue loss or other adverse business impacts. In the same study, 50% are leveraging the cloud-based technology with 9% using cloud-only, especially crossover cloud innovation, which offers the most abnormal amount of insurance for your organization’s information and IT foundation.

The above unfortunately is very prevalent among the Small and Medium-size Businesses (SMB), who assume that digital transformation and business continuity solutions are expensive and therefore are reluctant to invest in them.

A financial service company in the above predicament, approached Bitforge to explore how Bitforge can assist them transform their business digitally. This is with emphasis and focus on business continuity and disaster recovery so that they could meet their own Service Level Agreement (SLA) with their own customers.

To ensure that the customer will not have to pay a significant amount – the existing customer’s hardware was utilized. The chosen technology was based on Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualization and Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Release 02, which was provided to the customer on a lease basis.

As a start the customer’s existing virtualized environment was converted to Microsoft Hyper-V. Upon completion of the conversion, the customer’s Active Directory was migrated from Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Release 02, including making the necessary changes to support the newer format of Active Directory structure on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Release 02. Finally working together with the customer, their applications were migrated to the new virtualized environment.

A detailed investigation was conducted involving a comprehensive analysis and interaction with the customer to understand their business process. Bitforge proposed the following taking into consideration their requirements:

  • Migrate their existing virtualized environment to a new virtualized environment.
  • Migrate their existing Active Directory setup to a new Active Directory setup.
  • Migrate their existing applications running on existing virtualized environment to the new virtualized environment.
  • Introduce disaster recovery of their environment to the Cloudspace cloud platform.

During the entire migration process, the customer was loaned a temporary server where the migration was conducted taking the following steps:

  • Migrate the Virtual Machine, Active Directory and Applications to the loan server (at the end of this process, everything was using the newer Microsoft technologies provided by Bitforge).
  • Customer’s existing server was scrubbed and rebuilt.
  • Replicated all the Virtual Machines from the loan server to the customer’s existing server.

The above exercise was completed within a two-week period, with the migration to the loan server happening over a weekend. During this entire exercise there was no disruption to the customer’s operations.

Finally, the customer’s firewall was configured to establish a site-to-site VPN between the customer’s site and Cloudspace cloud platform, where the site-to-site was used to enable a site-to-site replication of the customer’s virtual machines to the Cloudspace cloud platform. This replication process fulfilled the customer’s need for a disaster recovery environment. This disaster recovery is tested by the customer together with their selected customer’s every six months with a failover and back into operations within their Service Level Agreement of fifteen minutes.

The entire solution did not cost the customer much because Bitforge fulfills its’ service and contractual obligations by structuring the cost over a thirty-six months payments. This also provides customers with a peace of mind that they are working with a service provider that is in it for a long haul!

Bitforge Sdn Bhd has access to Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) which allows it to lease Microsoft software to customer at very attractive rental basis without a customer needing to purchase the software.
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