Robert Roberts / Findlater Wine & Spirit Group  invest in virtualised disaster recovery and backup solution

Robert Roberts was established in Ireland in 1905 by E. Gaynor Goodbody. Although, E. Gaynor was born in England, his family were Quakers from Tullamore.    The company roasts and grinds their fresh coffee and blends their tea in a facility off the Broomhill Road in Tallaght.  Findlater Wine & Spirit Group was formed in March 2009 following the merger of two of Ireland’s most prestigious and historic wine companies: Woodford Bourne and Findlater-Grants.   Findlater Wine & Spirit group is a part of the Robert Roberts Group, which itself is part of the DCC Food & Beverage division.   The company employs 200 people in Ireland.  Robert Roberts has implemented a full virtualised disaster recovery and backup solution to reduce business risk, deliver high availability and be better prepared for disaster recovery.

“We had 15 physical servers, many of which needed to be replaced in order for the business to have confidence in the reliability of its IT systems. Additionally, we run a large batch job over the weekend to update our business intelligence database and this was taking some 14 hours to complete.” explains Jim Duggan, IS Manager at Robert Roberts.  “We needed a solution in place so that if some kind of interruption or disaster occurred, we could get back to work as quickly as possible.  In addition, we needed a robust infrastructure that would allow increased efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness by effectively connecting resources to business needs”.  Robert Roberts chose Trilogy Technologies as solution provider after a competitive review.  

Trilogy worked with the company to integrate its recovery infrastructure into Robert Robert’s fibre network over a high-speed leased line to its hot site using technology from VMWare, HP and Veeam.  Using Veeam to replicate servers to a backup server overnight allows the company to backup to tape the following day.  “This allows us to use instant recovery to recover a server in a couple of minutes should we need to,” continues Jim.  “This is a big bonus in terms of disaster recovery and business continuity planning and it has created confidence in the reliability of our IT systems.”  

Robert Robert’s weekend batch job now runs in one hour which means the company can now re-run it easily during the day should they need to.  “We have a secure backup/restore capability in minutes.” adds Jim.  “From a DR point of view we have a complete replication of all of our systems and the data is available on a server in our warehouse.”

“Trilogy professionals have expert knowledge in key areas related to high availability, data replication, and business continuity planning and solution deployment”, says Jim.  “We are very happy with the way the project has gone and very impressed with Trilogy’s approach and professionalism”.   The next phase for Robert Roberts is to investigate the feasibility of implementing a warehouse management system.