Cabot Square Capital Protects Critical Communications From Downtime With SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Exchange
London, UK – 11th January 2005 – Cabot Square Capital, a leading provider of investment capital, has implemented SteelEye Technology’s LifeKeeper for Exchange to protect its all-important Exchange server from damaging downtime.
Cabot Square Capital is a leading provider of investment capital for small and mid sized companies in the UK and Western Europe. The partners in the current fund of approximately ?300 million include some of the most experienced and successful institutional investors in the private equity sector.
The problem
Cabot Square Capital relies on Microsoft Exchange for its messaging and communication needs. Its IT administrators face the classic tasks of ensuring corporate resilience for critical applications and servers and of providing disaster recovery protection.
The solution
Cabot Square Capital brought in Open Minds, a distributor of LifeKeeper from SteelEye Technology, who were able to show the company how SteelEye’s LifeKeeper for Exchange solution provided the benefits needed.
Jay Derrett, Associate Director of IT of Cabot Square Capital, said: “As part of Cabot Square Capital’s ongoing reinforcement of its business procedures and infrastructure, our business continuity has been further enhanced in light of the heightened security threat to the UK. Our own strict criteria for full data replication and availability of IT have been addressed via the successful implementation of SteelEye’s LifeKeeper by Open Minds.”
One of the advantages of LifeKeeper is that it is proven to protect servers and applications using the existing local area network and a “Hot Backup’ server, rather than requiring an expensive wide area connection to another site. This enabled Cabot Square Capital to put LifeKeeper through full testing before going to the expense of equipping a disaster recovery site and installing connectivity between the two. SteelEye’s LifeKeeper was able to consistently provide recovery in less than 5 minutes.
The implementation
Once testing was complete and the concept proven, Cabot Square Capital’s IT managers procured a suitable remote site and the necessary wide area connectivity.
Derrett commented: “Despite the complex technical nature of the infrastructure, this project was completed on time, on budget and on specification. We continually test and monitor the LifeKeeper solution, and have yet to find fault in it. This gives Cabot Square Capital a high degree of confidence in our business continuity plan.”
LifeKeeper for Exchange now gives the company the ability to mirror Exchange data between the Mayfair site and its new disaster recovery site located in London’s Docklands. Among the other features that impressed Cabot Square Capital is the capability to pause and restart the mirror, creating a backup window, so that system maintenance and backups could be performed.
The benefits
At Cabot Square, the whole business depends on a functioning email system: downtime of the Exchange servers reduces productivity and costs money.
Derrett expanded: “We see protection of our Exchange servers with LifeKeeper as playing a key part in the development of resilience within the company’s infrastructure.”
“The level of service and general helpfulness of Open Minds and SteelEye influenced our decision, and the assistance we received from SteelEye to resolve issues was beyond the normal call of duty.”
“Overall, LifeKeeper has fostered a sense of reliability that has enabled staff to be more at ease with the email systems.”
Shobana Patel, of Open Minds, said: “This is an elegant solution to a classic situation, and certainly a scenario that we see often. LifeKeeper is a reliable, simple and cost-effective solution to the disaster recovery requirements of today’s organisations, and SteelEye went the extra mile with us to make sure the customer was happy.”
John Banfield, EMEA Director, SteelEye Technology, Inc., said: “In today’s business environments there is little room for errors, and that includes losing communications with colleagues, markets, partners, suppliers or customers. When so much of that communication is done by email, it makes enormous sense to protect the email system, and with LifeKeeper for Exchange we enable companies to do exactly that in a cost-effective way.”
The future
Having installed and seen the value of LifeKeeper for Exchange, Cabot Square Capital is now considering using LifeKeeper within other areas of its disaster recovery approach.