Terra Firma is one of Europe’s leading private equity firms.
It engaged Databarracks to replace an aging tape-based backup environment in 2015. It later also decommissioned one of it’s own data centres and moved its Disaster Recovery to Microsoft Azure.
Lee Colvin is Terra Firma’s Head of IT and Infrastructure. He first engaged with Databarracks to replace an aging tape-based backup environment in 2015.
“The first project we worked on with Databarracks was to update and improve the backups for our London HQ. We wanted to modernise and improve our methods so, as our existing tape hardware reached end-of-life, we reviewed the market for options.
“We were already using Asigra for remote backups in Guernsey so understood the technology and knew what we needed. It wasn’t simply a case of changing from tape to disk, we also wanted to bring in a service provider to handle the daily management and maintenance too.
“Backup is more of an operational requirement than a strategic function. We know we need it, we know we need it to work, and we know we want it to be cost-effective. Beyond that, my team’s time is better spent elsewhere.
“That service has been the biggest benefit. The original solution was Asigra backup software with our off-site data stored in Databarracks’ data centre, The Bunker. We have since substituted the software for Commvault and the cloud target for Azure. The components of the solution have changed to fit our needs, but the service has been consistent. As our production IT has evolved, we’ve also added protection to for SaaS data sources like Teams too.”
Financially, it made sense for us to decommission that data centre .... In Azure we don’t need to pay for hardware sitting idle. We can replicate to Blob storage and only provision the DR environment on recovery.
After several years, when Terra Firma reviewed its Disaster Recovery solution, it again turned to Databarracks.
Terra Firma was using Zerto to replicate between its sites.
“We were very happy with Zerto as our replication method, but we made the decision to retire one of our data centres.
“Financially, it made sense for us to decommission that data centre and take advantage of the public cloud for DR. In Azure we don’t need to pay for hardware sitting idle. We can replicate to Blob storage and only provision the DR environment on recovery.
“Spinning-up the DR environment at the point of recovery did mean it took slightly longer compared to replicating from VMware to VMware. We considered it to be a minor tradeoff for the benefit of the saving on the secondary data centre. It wasn’t a problem because the recovery speed was still within our agreed targets for the business. As the maturity of Azure and Zerto has improved, that disparity in recovery speed is actually decreasing all the time.
“For us, the Recovery Point Objective was more critical. Thankfully there was little change in the RPO and we continue to benefit from the Virtual Protection Group functionality in Zerto for application consistency when we recover.
“DRaaS was our first, foray into Microsoft Azure. It gave us the chance to get some hands-on experience without the threat of disruption to our production systems. As Microsoft has added more features, functionality, security and auditability, it is meeting our needs for production IT too.”
“In the time we’ve worked with Databarracks, we’ve gone through a lot of change. We swapped technologies from Asigra to Commvault and our cloud endpoint from Databarracks to Azure. We also added another service in DRaaS.
“We tend to look at these technologies as commodities. The service we receive from Databarracks is what is important to us. We get to outsource an important but uninteresting IT service. When we need recoveries, either for exercises or in-anger, we can lean on Databarracks’ engineers to make sure it all goes smoothly.
“The team excel at taking ownership of a challenge and delivering on their promises. The quality of management and support from the technical team at Databarracks has been excellent the whole way through. It’s exactly what we wanted from a managed service – everyone we speak to is knowledgeable, pro-active, and always available to help us.”