Virtual Lease Services (VLS) is a portfolio and risk management servicing partner for UK business and consumer finance providers. It provides key services to leading banks and financial institutions across the UK. VLS has facilitated nearly 1,000,000 contracts and collect around £30m each month, with close to £1b of receivables under management.
The consequence of any downtime for VLS is severe so it needed to improve its legacy Disaster Recovery solution to reduce Recovery Time Objectives of 24 hours.
Databarracks managed the installation of Azure Site Recovery (ASR) on VLS’ production infrastructure and the replication of data into Microsoft Azure.
Harvey Gill is IT Service Manager at VLS.
“Our Disaster Recovery solution was using legacy replication technology with Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) of 24 hours. This was too slow, given the nature of our clients’ data.
“We’re regulated by the FCA, so we understand the regulatory and operational risks of clients’ business environments.”
“The consequences of any downtime affect both VLS and our customers. We deal with around 30 million payments a month, so having constantly available data is a must. Plus, any downtime will severely impact our FCA and PRA regulated clients.”
Databarracks has been the ideal partner for this project...We needed a partner that could deliver the resilience solution we need right now, but also prepare us for future migration.
Databarracks managed the installation of Azure Site Recovery (ASR) on VLS’ production infrastructure and the replication of data into Microsoft Azure, consisting of its key Hyper-V VMs (including Oracle 10 and 11 servers).
Azure provides highly available and scalable, low-cost storage. VLS can spin-up Disaster Recovery servers, and only pay when they are needed.
“In our Disaster Recovery environment, we have two permanent, always-on servers. One is a NetScaler server – this is powered off until needed for DR, which saves bandwidth and doesn’t use up unnecessary resource. Similarly, an RDP server is powered off until needed for external access in addition to a firewall and load balancer.
“Replication is continuous with RPOs at 5 minutes, and retention of 24 hours. ASR also takes an app-consistent snapshot every 4 hours. Overall this totals around 10TB of data.
“We can access our DR recovery metrics in Azure, but Databarracks also provide regular service delivery reviews and full reporting as part of the managed service.”
“ASR to Azure has given confidence to our partners that clients’ data is secure and highly available. Our RPOs are now down to 15 minutes.
“Moving to Azure is a strategic objective for us. We don’t want to have to manage any IT infrastructure. Setting up DRaaS was the perfect first step for us to test the platform and gain experience without the risk of affecting our production systems and we’ve learned a lot.
“We now get better performance in Azure for Oracle. When tested against the old solution, the new performance is far better with Oracle sitting in Azure. This was a pleasant surprise for all involved and a good indicator for the future.”
Databarracks and VLS are currently working on a roadmap to fully migrate to Azure by 2020 to reduce cost and improve reliability of its IT infrastructure.
“Databarracks has been the ideal partner for this project. The team made the installation process smooth and didn’t sign off until it was working perfectly. We needed a partner that could deliver the resilience solution we need right now, but also prepare us for future migration.”