Microsoft increased disaster tolerance of the IT system of Aston Martin

April 13, 2015. The Aston Martin company announced creation of a data processing center and implemented the latest software of Microsoft, Hyper-V including Windows Server 2012 R2 OS with technology of virtualization and Azure Site Recovery (ASR) service.

Tasks

Each Aston Martin sports car is performing the modern engineering art integrating relevant scientific developments. That any failure in operation of the server did not prevent cars to reach the exacting owners, it was necessary to raise to increase disaster tolerance of all IT system – to create additional storage, to reduce time of scheduled and unplanned downtimes to a minimum and to increase the speed of disaster recovery of data. At the same time process of implementation of new software and copying of information of the main DPC in reserve should not have interfered with plant operation in Geydona and representative offices worldwide.

Project Progress

The IT department of Aston Martin used Windows Server 2012 R2 with technology of virtualization Hyper-V allowing to replicate constantly data from DPC in reserve DPC and to set a replication interval, and Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 for deployment of four cloud storages. That migration from one DPC in another took place in the normal mode, the service of complete backup and switching of the environment of loading of Azure Site Recovery (ASR) functioning on the Microsoft Azure platform was used. Thanks to ASR it is possible not only to configure replication of information between Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft Azure now, but also to create scenarios of recovery, without connecting third-party products.

Result

Upgrade of IT infrastructure provided the high level of data protection when copying and the subsequent storage, reduced time of idle times from several days till several o'clock and saved the company from multi-billion losses, representatives of the company integrator reported TAdviser.

"Production of luxury sports cars depends on reliable software. For this reason we selected Windows Server 2012 R2 as an optimal solution for ensuring business continuity", – Mark Green, Windows analyst Aston Martin comments.

"We use System Center 2012 to execute data backup. Earlier depending on a situation this process took away days or even weeks there are hours now. It is obvious that it is critical for such highly competitive business as automotive industry, – Mark Green, Windows analyst, Aston Martin added. – We looked for the effective automated solution which would allow to accelerate failure handling process. Having installed four servers and the system of disaster recovery in our laboratory, we could provide copying of 12 virtual machines every 5 minutes".