By using server configuration snap- shots and by cloning the virtual environment hosted on its servers, wheel and tyre specialist company Tiger Wheel & Tyre is able to back up its entire virtual environment every half hour and test applications on a test envi- ronment that perfectly mimics the live environment, says Tiger Wheel & Tyre group information technology (IT) executive Melody Fourie.

“We migrated to a virtual environment six years ago. We had a system crash in 2012 and, while we managed to recover all the data, we realised that we had to improve our backups and the stability of our systems.”

The company uses its on-site, virtualised servers to deliver its customer-facing applications, dealer portals and internal employee desktops, much of which is critical to its business operations, she adds.

“We still back up to tape, but recovery from tapes is not flawless and takes a long time. We estimated that we would only be able to recover our whole environment – 20 servers – within two to three weeks, if we had to failover to the backup tapes.”

However, Tiger Wheel & Tyre could use its virtual architecture, in which its servers host instances of its different systems, much more effectively and ensure on-site redundancy for all its systems, Fourie says.

“Using [virtual backup and recovery company] Veeam Software’s systems enables us to gather a snapshot of any part of our environment, whether a bare-metal snapshot of our server configuration, including port settings and Internet Protocol ranges, or a snapshot of our entire environment down to file level on every employee’s desktop. This enables us to recover from any crash within minutes because we always keep a copy of our environment on site and can easily redeploy our entire environment onto another server array, including IP ranges and employee desktops,” she explains.

Further, Tiger Wheel & Tyre currently uses the capabilities of its virtual backup systems to test the deployment of updates, new applications or changes in a test environment using an image of its current working environment.

“This has increased our research and development (R&D) agility in the IT depart- ment, as we can fully test all aspects of new changes or new applications, or updates on a simulated environment that precisely matches our working environment.

“We also have live redundancy on all our systems – we can easily pull a server offline because we can activate another server containing an exact duplicate of all the systems on that server and continue running without any downtime.”

Fourie adds that Tiger Wheel & Tyre’s IT department has full control over its entire virtual environment.

“The visibility of our systems and our control of crash recovery is granular and holistic. We often do ‘hot’ migrations of our environment, where we set up a test server to test changes or updates, and then switch the live environment to that server when we are satisfied with its operation,” she says.

The company’s virtual environment and virtual backup mean that its systems are not at risk from IT R&D and that the company can easily keep up with the changes demanded by its employees or customers, she concludes.