Northern Rail deploys FalconStors Network Storage Server

Network Storage Server (NSS), a data management and disaster recovery product from FalconStor, has assisted Northern Rail in cutting restoration time from 3 days to as much as 2 hours by replication important information between the two major data centers of the company.

The project lasting for 12 months was activated when Northern Rail’s board decided that they needed to cut down the recovery time objectives drastically from 48-72 hours to somewhere lower than 12 hours.

The company having 4,800 employees provides railway services to population of about 15 million citizens. The protection of SAP operating on Oracle’s databases was the major aim of this disaster recovery project and by considering the existing RTOs, the estimation was that a huge amount of data will be needed to be keyed in the systems.

The server manager at Northern Rail, Edwin Lloyd-Jones, said that the process of disaster recovery took a long time. He also added that, "We were backing up solely to tape, and if disaster struck we'd have to wait for hardware to be sourced and data to be restored from tape. That could take anything up to three days and the board had decided we needed to get that down to less than 12 hours."

Particular concerns regarding disaster recovery include the chief data center of Northern Rail at York, which is an area that floods regularly. The storage products provided by FalconStor can carry out the replication of data amongst the SANs of two vendors. Lloyd-Jones exclaimed that, “We're replicating delta changes of SAP data and VMware images continuously. Also time-marked changes, which is what we'd roll back to in case of a disaster recovery invocation.” He added that "FalconStor is storage-independent, which was important for us as we want to retain the ability in future to choose storage that suits our needs and not be restricted to one vendor".

The advantages of storage virtualization and disaster recovery solution implemented by Northern Rail has decreased the RTO to as low as two hours. The company is also deligted for the fact that FalconStor can scale itself for addition with other SANs manufactured by various venders.