E-Malt.com News article: UK: Carlsberg rolls out business continuity to key UK brewery

Carlsberg UK has completed implementation of a business continuity system at its Leeds brewery, designed to ensure the continued availability of key IT systems that control brewing operations, Computer World posted January 09.

The firm is using software from Double-Take to protect its site operations. Leeds is one of the company’s two two major breweries in the UK, with total production of 3 million hectolitres of beer each year.

The Double-Take platform continuously replicates data required by Carlsberg's brewery management systems from production to target servers. This means that if production servers fail, users failover to target servers so that they are able carry on working with little or no interruption to service and data.

Graeme Walker, senior systems engineer at Carlsberg UK, said that the main benefit of completing the project was the “guaranteed availability of a critical system, SCADA.”

And he said the introduction of the system also meant maintenance of servers had been greatly simplified.

“If we need to investigate problems, install patches and implement server or software upgrades, we are able to manually failover to the target units, leaving us free to work on the production servers without compromising performance.”

And Walker said another benefit of having two identical datasets was being able to run tape backup from the target servers.

“This means that the backup process doesn’t interfere with production performance and we are able to run the backups during standard working hours,” he said.


09 January, 2008