Phoenix Aviation Managers Take Flight With A Disaster Recovery Solution From InMage Systems And BMC Solutions

By InMage

The Challenge: Disaster Recovery on the Radar

Phoenix Aviation Managers is a wholly owned subsidiary of Old Republic International Corporation, one of the nation's 50 largest publicly held insurance enterprises, with assets exceeding $12 billion and capitalization of more than $4 billion. Since 1983, the company has served the general aviation community with a wide range of insurance products, providing coverage for airports and aircraft ranging from small to medium-sized private planes to corporate jets.

Phoenix's main data center is located in Kennesaw, Georgia. The company's mission-critical applications include SQL, Exchange, imaging and insurance. Additionally, Phoenix has a partially virtualized IT environment based on VMware that houses file and print servers, domain controllers, and the main file server that functions as the primary storage repository. A disaster recovery site is located in Suwanee, Georgia and houses another set of VMware machines and a storage area network (SAN).

"We were planning a disaster recovery (DR) implementation for our Kennesaw location and required technology that would replicate the data on our production servers in real time to the DR site in Suwanee," said Chris Morris, assistant vice president of IT for Phoenix Aviation Managers. "Hurricane Katrina was definitely a driving factor in our decision to expand our DR capabilities. We had an office in New Orleans that went down, and recovery was very challenging. Data wasn't being replicated in Kennesaw at the time, so it took us a while to get everything back up and running."