Wolseley UK, which operates
plumbing and building outlets including Plumb Centre, Build Centre
and Bathstore, is investing in disaster recovery arrangements for
critical business IT systems.
The company has signed a three-year contract with disaster
recovery specialist NDR to provide back-up computer systems, and it
has begun work on building redundancy into its own datacentres.
The work forms part of a wider review by the firm of its
business continuity plans designed to ensure that the company's
supply chain continues to function in the event of an
emergency.
"It has basically given us the ability to recover our systems in
the event of a major outage and added to our existing disaster
recovery facilities," said Richard Rowe, technical infrastructure
manager.
The contract, which costs the equivalent of Wolseley's gross
margin for one day, will pay for itself after one business
interruption, said Rowe.
The company is investing in back-up systems, supplied by
Northgate, for 11 high-powered Sun servers running the firm's
Unix-based branch management system.
The servers will operate in duplicate pairs across two adjacent
datacentres. If one server fails, users will automatically be
switched over to its twin.
NDR will provide back-up for other critical systems that
Wolseley is not able to duplicate economically, including the
company's PeopleSoft enterprise resource planning system, which
runs on an HP Superdome server.
Wolseley plans to install a 100mbps communications link between
the Superdome server and NDR's disaster recovery centre in
Birmingham, to provide real-time back-up of data.
In the event of a disaster, Wolseley staff will transfer data
back-up tapes from its major facilities at Ripon to the Birmingham
centre, while NDR technicians will load the operating systems and
applications onto servers.
The contract also includes an option to rebuild critical systems
in a mobile datacentre, which could be quickly driven from the
Birmingham back-up centre to Wolseley's head office in Leamington
Spa.
UK firms still lag on recovery plans
www.computerweekly.com/220437