Zerto, setting the standard for disaster recovery in virtualized and
cloud environments, today announced a successful business continuity
project with Stonegate Farmers, the largest UK supplier within the egg
supply chain working with major retail customers including ASDA,
Sainsbury's and Waitrose.
All
Stonegate Farmers eggs are produced in the UK to the rigorous British
Lion Quality standard and are packaged in locations around England and Wales. This includes a state-of-the-art site in Wiltshire,
the largest and only dedicated free range and organic packing operation
in the world. Stonegate guarantees fast and accurate product grading as
part of an operation that delivers millions of eggs to the shelves of
shops around the UK every single day.
Since
2000, Stonegate Farmers has evolved and grown through a number of
acquisitions that has left a number of legacy and disparate IT systems
across the organizations. As part of a standardization and improvement
project, the company turned to Meridian IT to deliver a transformational
upgrade including the design and implementation of a comprehensive
business continuity and disaster recovery plan.
Faced
with the potential financial and reputational damage of an IT outrage
alongside health issues associated with food production and
distribution, Stonegate places a high degree of importance on the
reliability of its critical applications including its Oracle JD Edwards
ERP and Microsoft SQL databases.
Meridian
delivered a successful project to move Stonegate's mission critical
applications onto a virtualized platform. To meet the business
continuity requirements of the business, Meridian replaced the tape
based backup process with an implementation of a near synchronous
replication solution using Zerto Virtual Replication across a virtual
machine environment.
The
Zerto solution was deployed and up and running within one hour with
virtual protection groups (VPG) to deliver write-order fidelity and
consistency across the virtual machines. Applications like Oracle JDE
can be difficult to protect, however, with VPGs, the IT team at
Stonegate Farmers can easily group VMs into collections with write-order
fidelity. Delivering the consistent replication and recovery of
critical applications enables the team to meet the demands of the
business.
As Jason Gillam,
Group IT Manager for Stonegate Farmers Ltd explains, "The virtual
protection groups really simplified how we protect our applications. We
have a mission critical ERP application Oracle JD Edwards with Microsoft
SQL Server, and email applications which are vital to our environment
and have dependencies that we need to account for. Automating many of
the recovery steps through the groups ensures the process will execute
in the same way every time."
The
successful virtualization and the use of Zerto as the core of its
business continuity strategy has helped Stonegate avoid the cost
associated with continual configuration management of target VMs
required to maintain failover readiness. In addition, Zerto Virtual
Replication tracks all the vMotion and Storage changes to further
automate and reduce delays during failover and failback processes.