SIOS Software Ensures 24/7 Availability, Failover And Disaster Recovery Of Theatre’s Online Ticketing System
The theatre with the highest regular annual attendance in the United Kingdom uses SIOS Protection Suite software. The software safeguard the online ticketing system keeping it available 24/7, even in the event of software bugs, hardware failure or unanticipated outages. SIOS Protection Suite meets Birmingham Hippodrome’s failover, replication and disaster recovery needs. The company moved off a hosted server and onto its own in-house networking infrastructure. By doing so, the theatre has freed itself to develop a new marketing strategy based around its website and database of customers.
The Challenge
Birmingham Hippodrome wrote a detailed specification. It called for a new network infrastructure that would deliver full failover and disaster recovery, with no single point of failure. The new infrastructure would need to be flexible and resilient. It would also need to enable them to tailor the system to improve marketing around its website and database of customers. That meant the infrastructure would essentially need to run all back office tasks. This includes a new e-mail system, the theatre’s own ticket booking, de-booking and credit card service.
The Solution
To deliver full failover and disaster recovery protection, IT infrastructure consultancy eSpida built two server rooms approximately one mile apart. Each replicating to the other. If one server failed, the other server would continue operations. They also implemented two leased lines and established two service providers at two points in the city with two separate main supplies. Birmingham wanted to simplify server “housekeeping.” The Hippodrome’s network infrastructure has been virtualised with 20 virtualised servers on IBM x3650 hardware and twin dual-core CPUs with 32 GB RAM and local disk. They use SIOS software to ensure continuous availability of applications and the online ticketing system.
SIOS Protection Suite creates a “mirrored” server system on the remote site that is identical to the primary server. If the primary server fails, SIOS software can shut it down and transfer all operations to the backup server while providing continuous access to applications and data. This capability ensures that both Birmingham Hippodrome staff and customers shopping for tickets online are unaffected by system failures or maintenance. SIOS software monitors system and application health, maintains client connectivity. It provides uninterrupted data access, giving Birmingham Hippodrome the reliable, fault-resilient system they need.
Benefit Of Failover And Disaster Recovery Solution
Another benefit of SIOS software is that installation and set-up is a quick and hassle-free process. High availability and protection of the theatre’s overall operations may have seemed like a daunting task. But SIOS Protection Suite was installed, configured, tested and in production within a few days.
For the first six months of operation, one of the servers was freezing up about once a month. In each case, SIOS software failed over to the back-up server in under a minute. The few initial instances of server failure went largely unnoticed, thanks to SIOS.
SIOS software enables Hippodrome to provide a total solution that includes hardware, installation, as well as supplementary services related to disaster recovery.
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