Disaster recovery following server failure

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Masteroast Coffee Company is an independently owned and operated coffee roasting and packing facility based in Peterborough which ships to distributors UK wide. Their reliance on IT for operations is considerable.

In April 2014, the server providing files and control to the labelling operation failed suddenly and catastrophically. In a busy production environment, this failure was potentially an enormous obstacle to getting orders out of the door.

Challenges

  • Restoring operations for a critical function and resurrecting the capability on a server with catastrophic hardware failure in a very short time frame.

Solution

  • Utilise a spare server chassis for recovery and reconfigure as required.

Process

  • Diagnose issue
  • Identify spare chassis
  • Swapped existing disk array into spare chassis
  • Reconfigured networking and IP addressing on new chassis to match old
  • Restore to network

Results

  • From initial flag on our monitoring system to fully operational took less than 4 hours
  • Spare server chassis plugged straight back into network with no need to reconfigure applications or label printers
  • Negligible impact on operations with no orders delayed
  • Allowed time to plan and implement a replacement server without further disruption of operations
Lindsey Hall

As both an entrepreneur and an IT specialist, Lindsey offers a blend of deep technical expertise and commercial insight, delivered in language business owners can really understand and trust. She works with clients to provide a full range of services from strategic advice through to project management and infrastructure support. Lindsey is an accredited Cyber Essentials Consultant