Peak 10 keeps production systems running with Carbonite Availability

Peak 10 offers business customers a robust, secure, compliant and highly available cloud environment.

The environment, which is just one component of Peak 10’s broad portfolio of hybrid IT infrastructure solutions, powers the company’s colocation services and a variety of managed offerings, including disaster recovery (DR).

Peak 10 regularly migrates customer data and applications into its cloud and other hosted environments, and these migrations need to be completed without disrupting customer operations. That’s why Peak 10 uses Carbonite Availability Powered by DoubleTake, a powerful and proven high availability (HA) and DR solution.

In the past, migrations were completed by downloading data and applications to portable media, carting the media to the new location, and loading the data and applications onto new servers. This typically took many hours, or days. And sending the data electronically wasn’t much faster due to bandwidth limitations and large file sizes.

During the migrations, production operations came to a halt. Taking production servers offline was the best way to ensure that all critical business data made it to the new location successfully. Today, Peak 10 customers want their data and applications to be available 24/7. To meet this demand, Peak 10 requires an HA/DR solution for heterogeneous environments that delivers unmatched uptime. That’s where Carbonite Availability comes in.

“Carbonite Availability works with so many different platforms and is hardware agnostic,” said Steve Renda, vice president of product management at Peak 10. “Our front-line users talk about its ease of use and its ability to make migrations seamless.”

The solution
Peak 10 uses Carbonite Availability to power DR solutions it offers customers, as well as for its own internal HA/DR needs. The company also uses Carbonite Availability to perform downtime-intolerant migrations.

Carbonite Availability replicates the server being migrated and stores copies of its data and applications on a backup server. It then keeps the two servers synchronized by replicating data between them in real time. Users can quickly switch to the backup whenever the primary server is unavailable.

When the Peak 10 team moves a customer into its cloud or onto a colocated server, they use Carbonite Availability to replicate the data and applications from the customer’s previous environment.

Migrations with near-zero downtime
Carbonite Availability keeps the two servers completely synchronized until the customer is ready to make the final transition. As a result, the customer can continue running important business applications throughout the migration without the risk of data loss.

Carbonite Availability supports a wide range of hardware and software platforms, which is perfect for the diverse Peak 10 computing environment. The company uses several different platforms—including Microsoft Windows and Linux-based hardware and software—to power its cloud computing and colocation services. Carbonite Availability allows Peak 10 to manage the availability of its entire environment from a common management interface. This simplifies administration and reduces training requirements.

The Peak 10 IT team also likes the fact that Carbonite Availability automates many important processes. For example, Carbonite Availability performs comprehensive self-checks and automatically issues alerts about any important issues an administrator may need to address.

“We’ve used other tools for replication in the past, but the challenge was that they weren’t as complete as we needed them to be,” Renda explained. “There was no notification if something went wrong, so it could be weeks until someone detected a problem. This passive approach simply didn’t work for us, and that’s one of the reasons why we turned to Carbonite Availability.”