Virtual power

Newfoundland Power Inc., the electricity provider for the province of Newfoundland and Labrador based in St. John’s, has taken the path towards virtualization by working with Microsoft Gold Certified partner, Double-Take Software, to upgrade its disaster recovery management solution.The Double-Take for Virtual Systems recovery solution has been up and running in Newfoundland Power’s infrastructure since February and monitors data disaster recovery needs through the use of a virtual server environment. Using virtualization technology, each application is independently protected by a single virtual server. Since implementing this new solution, Newfoundland Power says it has witnessed significant returns on investment.

John Pope, applications project lead at Newfoundland Power, said the company was enticed to make the move towards virtualization because of one main driver.

“We started looking at the virtual server because of consolidation,” Pope said. “We’re committed to getting back some of our own time. Since we’ve had this in place, we’ve been able to work on other things and tasks that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do.”

Addressing the distress
The company eventually enlisted the help of Double-Take Software to create a software solution to address their disaster recovery and virtualization solution needs.

Bob Roudebush, director of solutions engineering at Double-Take, explained some of the features of Newfoundland Power’s solution.

“We provide a software solution that replicates in real-time data from one server to another server in the event of a major disaster,” Roudebush said.

Using Double-Take for Virtual Systems, data is replicated both to and from a virtual environment that acts as the disaster recovery site. In addition, the solution is also compatible with all editions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 applications.

“One of the inherent benefits of software based replication is that you can use the already existing infrastructures,” Roudebush said. “And you can load the software into the production systems to get things up and running in just a few minutes.”

When it came to deploying and installing this solution, there was little training needed from both the partner and end-user side.

“With virtual server and Double-Take, there was no formal training,” Pope said. “We had a couple demos from Double-Take and they showed us how it worked. That was all we needed to know.”

But of course, on Double-Take’s end, training services are provided to those who need it, including customers. Roudebush said the company offers hands-on training sessions in addition to Web-based training and in-class training.

Hilary Wittmann, senior product manager for Windows Server at Microsoft Canada, highlights some key reasons as to why many businesses are turning towards virtualization software.

“We’ve seen phenomenal uptake for our products with the virtual server,” Wittmann said. “We’ve also seen a high demand for virtualization. People are turning to this service because of the cost-savings and also because it’s so easy to use. Microsoft’s approach to optimizing customer’s infrastructures is that we can provide easy to use tools. Our solutions are easy to use right out of the box.”

As education and awareness increases, Roudebush expects the demand for disaster recovery solutions with the virtual server environments to grow.

“We’re continuing to expand our operations both in Canada and throughout the rest of the world,” Roudebush said. “We will continue to educate more customers about what our software does. With Newfoundland Power, they wanted virtualization so machines could store and replicate information centrally. We provided them with a solution that met those needs.

“We want to continue to invest in technology and continue to make it easy to deploy, install and maintain,” Roudebush said.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Maxine Cheung
Maxine Cheung
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