Business News
Shuttleworths Disaster Recovery saves the day at GSM Graphics
Friday 22. October 2010 - GSM Graphic Arts, The Label, Nameplate and Fascia Specialist, is based in Thirsk, North Yorkshire. They are a leading manufacturer of metal labels, metal nameplates, graphic overlays, resin dome labels, roll labels, metal barcodes, plastic labels, front panels and measuring equipment.
They have been using The Shuttleworth MIS since 2006 and earlier this year Peter Young, Site Manager at GSM Graphic Arts, decided to install a Virtual System Restore facility which gets the Shuttleworth System back up and running in the fastest possible time following a server hardware failure.
“It was quick and easy to install” said Peter, “A Shuttleworth engineer visited us on-site and installed a VMWare virtual machine which made an exact copy of each live server and then stored it on an external USB disk. Therefore in the event of a catastrophic hardware failure, the virtual machine could be brought up on the network, running on either a good spec PC or an alternative server.”
“Its one of those things you invest in and never expect to use”, Peter continued, “However, a few weeks ago, our Small Business Server failed and this left us in the position where none of our PCs could log onto the network. We also couldnt access Shuttleworth MIS or other network resources.”
Peter placed a call to the Shuttleworth Support Team and they talked him through retrieving the Virtual Image and powering it up on one of the PCs. “It was unbelievably simple” he said.
As the small business server at GSM Graphic Arts was not used for file storage, all users were able to log onto the network via the virtual machine within minutes. They continued to work normally until later in the day when a Shuttleworth Engineer arrived and replaced the faulty components on the main server. Once the problem was resolved the virtual was powered down and the main server brought back up again.
Without the Virtual System Restore facility, GSM Graphic Arts would have been without a network and email facility for a considerable amount of time. As it was, any down time was minor, occurring only whilst the virtual was brought on-line. This meant minimal disruption and more importantly no data was lost. “For us the Virtual System Restore has certainly been worth its weight in gold as it turned a potential disaster into a slight inconvenience” Peter concluded.