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RSPB wings it with virtualisation
Case study: Charity clips downtime for disaster recovery

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Monday 04 June 2007

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has buffed up its disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure using virtualisation to increase flexibility and reduce the risk of downtime.

The RSPB is using between 15 and 20 physical VMware ESX servers to run 60 to 70 virtual machines, which hold the charity's applications and databases.

These applications are backed up to a central library at a secondary site from where they can be restored for disaster recovery or testing and development purposes.

Mike Courtney, senior systems engineer at the RSPB, said virtualisation has helped the RSPB develop a flexible and scalable platform to manage its back-up and restore process.

Courtney added this technology has provided significant benefits in terms of reducing operational downtime and streamlining the test and development process.

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The RSPB is using Vizioncore esxRanger Professional to back up its virtualised environment by saving images of the virtual machines while they are still running.

These images are stored centrally on the RSPB's network and also sent as compressed files to a separate secondary site to support disaster recovery. The DR systems sit in an entirely separate building so anything affecting the main server room - such as a power cut or flood - does not affect the back-up server.

Courtney told silicon.com the RSPB is "not going mad" with the numbers of virtualised servers it is installing to keep management and licence costs down.

He said: "We will always try to use an existing server if possible. If not, we will go through the cost-benefits of having a physical or virtualised server depending on what the project needs."

According to Courtney, since the RSPB began developing its virtualised environment in mid-2004 there have not been any big issues and the longest period of downtime to hit the system has been two hours.