A disaster recovery program ensures a housing authority’s ability to operate in the event of a disaster.

Utah Housing Corporation

www.utahhousingcorp.org

Headquartered in West Valley City, Utah, the Utah Housing Corporation (UHC) is a publicly held organization created in 1975 by state legislators to provide mortgage loans to low- and moderate-income home buyers, and to financially support developers building or renovating affordable apartments for the people of Utah.

In April 2016, UHC lacked a disaster recovery program for its primary computing resources, which consisted of physical and virtual Windows® systems and IBM® i LPARs. Although UHC was using Carbonite® EVault™ to back-up their data locally and to the cloud, it did not have a recovery data center or redundant hardware that could be used to restore its data and resume business operations in a timely and reliable fashion. In the event of a disaster, it could have taken weeks to bring their applications back online.

Sirius analyzed UHC’s IT environment, establish minimum recovery-point and recovery-time objectives, and engineer a solution to meet those objectives. The solution powered by Recovery Point included coverage for all of UHC’s disaster risks, as well as convenient on-site file restoration capabilities.

The full, end–to-end solution included a needs analysis, solution design and engineering, on-site implementation, onboarding, training, proof-of-concept testing and runbooks.

All the testing was accomplished remotely, eliminating travel costs for UHC’s participating IT staff. The solution included:

• 38+ TB (usable) of on-site SAN storage for local Veeam© backups
• Replication of physical and virtual Windows systems backups to the Recovery Point Cloud
• On-demand cloud infrastructure for restoration of physical and virtual Windows systems
• Local backups of IBM Power Systems™ servers to a Dell® EMC Data Domain appliance
• Replication of IBM i backup data to a second Data Domain appliance at Recovery Point
• On-demand Power Systems hardware for restoration of two IBM i LPARs
• A redundant multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) connection to UHC’s background financial services provider

The UHC IT team now has a state-of-the-art DRaaS program in place to ensure that a successful recovery can be completed and the organization can continue to operate even if its environment has been impacted by a disaster. A successful test of the overall solution achieved rapid recovery of Veeam backup data in the Recovery Point cloud, and full restoration of IBM i functionality using the target-side Data Domain and Recovery Point IBM i infrastructure. Following the initial deployment, Veeam licenses were added for additional local server backup-only services. These servers are backed-up locally to disk and then replicated off-site on a nightly basis to Recovery Point’s Cloud Backup as a Service (BaaS) infrastructure, where the data will be periodically saved to tape. This disk-to-disk-to-tape service allows UHC to quickly restore files and folders from the local repository, as well as archiving data to tape to reduce storage costs.

Sirius and Recovery Point are partners in the design and management of business recovery, hybrid cloud recovery and high availability solutions across a wide range of heterogeneous platforms and technologies. This strategic relationship spans both production and disaster recovery deployments hosted at Recovery Point’s Tier III-certified facilities. Sirius’ deep managed services expertise complements Recovery Point’s capabilities, creating unique turnkey solutions that are offered by both organizations.

To learn more about Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and managed services solutions from Sirius, speak with your Sirius representative, or contact Sirius at 800-460-1237.