Case Studies

Backup and Disaster Recovery – West of England P&I

West of England P&I Company Background

The West of England P&I is a leading mutual marine insurer providing its worldwide membership of ship owners, charterers, and operators with liability insurance and related services. Formed originally as a British mutual, the club has insured ship owners for over 150 years and was one of the first to insure international tonnage. It now insures over 6,000 ships with an entered tonnage of over 70 million gross tons with a worldwide membership.

The West of England P&I Challenge

This commitment to service quality for their worldwide members results in great demands for the constant availability of the Club’s IT infrastructure, which is a completely virtualised VMware environment. Over time, the recovery time expectations from the business have become more demanding and the Chief Information Officer, Tony Surkovic, therefore decided to review their backup and DR requirements from the ground up. The objective was to have a completely seamless fail-over to the DR site in the event of suffering an infrastructure failure or a complete loss of their HQ site near Tower Bridge in London.

The Solution

Having decided to approach our DR strategy afresh, we then spent considerable time researching the backup technologies available on the market and completed trials on a couple of the more promising solutions. When we engaged with Covenco to examine our disaster recovery options they provided a comprehensive independent analysis of the leading backup technologies with the added value of being able to illustrate how each solution would provide the necessary RTOs and RPOs that we were seeking to achieve. Crucially, what differentiated Covenco from the other solution suppliers was that, instead of putting the primary focus on selling us a particular backup technology, they demonstrated their expertise in recovery. Technologically perfect backups are worthless unless you have rock-solid processes and procedures for recovery. Tony Surkovic, Chief Information Officer, West of England P&l Club.

The Result

Covenco delivered a compelling Proof of Concept, which enabled us to test all of the essential elements of the complete backup and disaster recovery solution. We now replicate our critical VMs to the Covenco disaster recovery site every two hours, which significantly reduces our risk of data loss between backup cycles. Two years on, we’ve now had three very successful disaster recovery tests at Covenco. So we’re very comfortable with our decision and confident that we can achieve our recovery time objectives in the event of a disaster recovery situation. Martin Cheverall, Technical Infrastructure Manager, West of England P&l Club.

Being vendor independent allows us to provide the most suitable solution for each client. We must ensure that the backup solution satisfies all their expectations, integrates seamlessly with the disaster recovery services to deliver the RTOs and RPOs as defined by the business. Gurdip Sohal, Sales Director, Covenco