Peers Hardy

Peers Hardy

Peers Hardy is a leading specialist in watches, clocks and jewellery, supplying their own label watches to high street stores as well as a number of different watch brands including Pocket, Radley, Daniel Wellington and children’s brands such as Hello Kitty and Peppa Pig.

The Brief

Peers Hardy currently operates with three physical and seven virtual servers and have 110 PC and Mac users.

Peers Hardy rejected the possibility of offsite disaster recovery through SAN replication as it was too expensive with £45,000 spent on hardware and software that would only be used in the event of failure. The IT Manager at Peers Hardy, decided to consult with ACUTEC on other possibilities for offsite disaster recovery.

ACUTEC met with the IT Manager and Finance Director to discuss the business’ needs and to gain an understanding of the impact of an outage of the IT systems. ACUTEC recommended Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, a solution so cost effective that the original budget will not be spent for almost seven years and it will always be up to date. Plus, there is no need to travel for maintenance between sites.

‘Microsoft Azure has turned our business around – we’ve shifted from being reactionary to planning ahead. We have greater confidence in disaster recovery and we’re saving significant time and cost. ACUTEC’s knowledge and close relationship with Microsoft have been pivotal in getting our IT infrastructure to where it is now.’ – Mark Griffiths, IT Manager at Peers Hardy

The Solution

Microsoft Azure Site Recovery is a cloud based disaster recovery option. Before Microsoft Azure recovering individual or all of your servers to an offsite location without problems or major costs had been difficult to achieve. Microsoft Azure Site Recovery orchestrates and automates replication and failover to either Azure in the Cloud or a secondary site. The best way to explain Azure Site Recovery is like the pilot light on your boiler. You buy the boiler but you only turn the pilot light on when you need it. With Azure you buy the service but you only pay for the recovery when it is needed, an expense that is more than likely covered by your insurance, This is a cost effective enterprise level solution allowing you to recover to the Cloud safely and securely.

‘Our security and continuity is better than we could have imagined. We ship goods daily but if we’d have lost a site before, it would have taken days to recover. I now can recover sites from Azure in 15 minutes or less.’

What ACUTEC Did

Working closely with Peers Hardy, ACUTEC identified and met the specific objectives that were needed for the project to be successful, these included:

• The ability to replicate the virtual environment to Azure Site Recovery
• The ability to recover the entire environment to and from Azure Site Recovery
• Access to Peers Hardy’s server in the Azure Site Recovery environment

When asked whether he felt the project had been successful, the IT Manager stated: ‘it went really really well, we were encouraged by the approach, the knowledge of the staff, the friendly feel, we got on really well. It was refreshing to be honest.’ By using Microsoft Azure, Peers Hardy now have a cost effective disaster recovery solution that is always up to date.