Case Study: Gift of Life

About Client

Gift of Life Marrow Registry is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. Established in 1991, the organization is dedicated to saving lives by facilitating bone marrow and blood stem cell transplants for patients with leukemia, lymphoma, and other blood-related diseases.

Gift of Life

The Challenge

Gift of Life had a critical database of over 11 terabytes (TB). The size of the database and their manual disaster recovery (DR) methods resulted in a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of over 24 hours. They needed a solution to help them improve their RPO, especially for higher priority data.

The Solution – RMM with Selective Sync

A key feature of the RackWare Management Module (RMM) is selective sync. With selective sync, users can sync only select drives, directories, and files, thereby improving RPO while reducing WAN bandwidth usage.

This is done by the creation of inclusion and exclusion lists for the sync process, e.g. sync everything except specific items like log files. Multiple DR policies can be created for workloads of different priority levels. For example, a company could create:

  • One policy for mission-critical workloads with shorter time between syncs and hence an aggressive RPO.

  • A second policy for non-critical workloads with a longer sync frequency that can help save costs.

Process

RackWare discovered that only 200GB of the 11 TB database was critical. Hence, Gift of Life’s database synchronization was divided into two operations:

  1. The first sync focused on the 200GB of critical data. This sync now runs continuously, drastically reducing the RPO for this data.

  2. The second sync of the remaining data happens after work hours and finishes before the next workday begins.

Results

Through our technology, RackWare was able to:

  1. Cut RPO of their mission-critical data to 10 minutes.

  2. Save costs on their disaster recovery by scheduling the sync of non-mission critical data later at night, avoiding high network traffic and requiring no downtime during business hours.

To learn more about how RackWare can help you protect your workloads in the cloud, contact us.

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