Disaster Recovery Success Drives Cloud Migration and Managed Services 

Full cloud migration and managed services of plant manufacturing servers increases performance and peace of mind. 

A subsidiary of a fast-growing restaurant chain is a critical vendor and plays a vital role in its supply chain. The company is responsible for crafting and supplying the restaurant chain with lemon juice used in its lemonade. With more than 2,900+ locations nationwide, any data loss or system downtime at the subsidiary company would have a ripple effect across the supply chain — impacting revenue and profitability. Based on the success of establishing a Disaster Recovery posture utilizing AWS services, with proven ability to meet RTO/RPO requirements, the organization determined that a fully configured Cloud environment would greatly reduce onsite dependencies and allow for an overall reduction of system management by utilizing a Cloud based Managed Service Provider.  This move also supports the parent corporation’s strategic goals to reduce physical datacenter and the associated costs with them. 

Technologies Involved

AWS

AWS EC2
AWS RDS MSSQL
AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudWatch
AWS S3
AWS CloudFront
AWS ELB
AWS DRS
AWS Route53
AWS VPN
AWS Outpost
AWS Backup Services

TekStream Toolbox

Managed Services Solutions

AWS

Key Pain Points

Existing on-premise systems were running on VMWare instances with little physical redundancy.

On-premise configurations meant that there were multiple service providers required to maintain functionality and stability of applications

Corporate strategy for cloud-based environments meant on-prem environments are being reduced and control capabilities are increased while reducing overall operational costs

Solution Provided

In a previous engagement focused on business continuity, TekStream leveraged its in-depth discovery and needs analysis, and identified Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Disaster Recovery Services (DRS) as the preferred platform to support the subsidiary company’s business continuity goals. As a result of that engagement, the subsidiary gained the ability to utilize AWS DRS’s block-level data replication to back-up critical data without impacting system performance. AWS DRS runs continuously in the background of the subsidiary company’s operations, ensuring all restoration points are continually updated without manual oversight or system reboots.  This solution improved the subsidiary company’s resilience to potential disasters and attacks and empowered its IT and security team to restore any lost, stolen or corrupted data quickly.  Because of this success, the organization realized that migration of these on-premise solutions to a Cloud-based architecture was not only viable, but would prove to be more cost effective in terms of operational costs. 

TekStream worked with the subsidiary to create a cloud architecture, based on the previous Disaster Recovery architecture, with infrastructure to support bi-directional communication back to factory services.  Utilizing AWS MGN services, TekStream worked with the subsidiary and its software vendors to migrate the system over to AWS.  During this migration, there was opportunity to perform some modernization of network, security, database and server architecture to utilize AWS Cloud native services.   

TekStream, who had implemented the previous Disaster Recovery Services and managed the infrastructure, was asked to continue supporting the new Cloud-based environment.  As a result, they worked with the subsidiary and associated software vendors to configure alerts, escalations, runbooks, and provide 24x7x365 monitoring services and remediation processes. This ensures the new environment is maintained, patched and operational to meet the manufacturing demands of the client. 

Key Successes

  • Migration of VMWare servers to AWS Compute and Container Services 
  • Migration of MS SQL Servers to AWS RDS for MSSQL 
  • Established Cross Region Disaster Recovery Services from West Coast to East Coast 
  • Continuous, automatic updates of critical recovery points 
  • Disaster Recovery fail over and restore in less than two hours from time of an outage 
  • Initiated 24 by 7 monitoring services, remediation runbooks, and on-demand support to ensure operational excellence of the Cloud-based environments and continuous operations of the applications 
  • Improved peace of mind through reliable snapshot recovery, patching services, and real-time monitoring and alerting services 

Customer Profile

Category: Food and Beverage

Product/Service: Dedicated Food Manufacturer

Revenue: $64 Billion

Number of Locations: 2,900+

A subsidiary of a fast-growing restaurant chain is a critical vendor and plays a vital role in its supply chain.