British American Tobaccoemploys more
than 55,000 people worldwide and sells its brands in more than 180
countries. With such a global presence, always-available 24x7
access to corporate tools such as e-mail and management platforms
is vital to support executives travelling across the world and
operating in many time zones.
With mobile working such an integral part of
British American Tobacco's business, the company is rolling out
a five-stage project to equip executives with Blackberry handhelds
with advanced capabilities, such as mobile access to SAP systems,
secure browsing of the company's intranet content and powerful
search capabilities.
As part of this project, British American Tobacco required a
robust
business continuity system to ensure high availability for its
Blackberry environment. When examining the available options, one
stipulation was that the system would have to protect not only
BritBritish American Tobacco rolls out Neverfail
British American Tobacco employs more than 55,000 people
worldwide and sells its brands in more than 180 countries. With
such a global presence, always-available 24x7 access to corporate
tools such as e-mail and management platforms is vital to support
executives travelling across the world and operating in many time
zones.
With mobile working such an integral part of British American
Tobacco's business, the company is rolling out a five-stage project
to equip executives with Blackberry handhelds with advanced
capabilities, such as mobile access to SAP systems, secure browsing
of the company's intranet content and powerful search
capabilities.
As part of this project, British American Tobacco required a
robust business continuity system to ensure high availability for
its Blackberry environment. When examining the available options,
one stipulation was that the system would have to protect not only
British American Tobacco's Blackberry Enterprise Server, but also
its IBM Lotus Domino and
Microsoft SQL Server installations, all of which support
British American Tobacco's mobile strategy.
British American Tobacco chose a system from Neverfail, which
was able to offer this capability as well as provide seamless
failover at the touch of a button.
In September 2006, British American Tobacco deployed the
Neverfail suite for a pilot group of 70 executives. To put the
system to the test, the headquarters IT team planned a failover of
its Blackberry, Lotus Domino and SQL Server services to its
disaster recovery site, located 40 miles from the London head
office, during business hours.
"We failed over soon after the start of the business day, and
all Blackberry services ran for the day without a problem," said
Laurence Dale, technical architect of the company's Blackberry
system. "We failed back that evening without any disruption in
service."
The Neverfail technology allows British American Tobacco to
clone data from a primary server on a passive secondary server, and
monitors the performance of the application environment. If
problems are encountered, users can be switched to the secondary
server while staying connected to working applications.
Through the use of mobile devices, British American Tobacco
estimates that executives gain an average of 50 minutes of extra
productivity a day.
"British American Tobacco's mobile platforms have come to lie at
the heart of our business use of technology," said David Sampson,
head of headquarters IT at the company.
● Neverfail is exhibiting on stand 270 at Storage Expo 2007