About Shanghai American School
Established in 1912, Shanghai American School is an independent, non-profit school offering an American education programme for expatriate students, from pre-kindergarten to Grade 12. Located on two campuses, in the west (Puxi) and east (Pudong) of Shanghai, it is China's largest international school, with about 3,000 students from almost 40 countries and about 500 staff.
Challenge
Shanghai American School provides a comprehensive range of information and administration services to teachers, staff, students and parents. Parents can check grades, students can look at coursework, and teachers can review classes - all online.
The administration services are critical to the smooth running of the school; unplanned outages or planned shutdowns for maintenance quickly cause backlogs of requests. In addition, because many parents are overseas in different time zones, it is vital to keep information services running day and night.
"The main challenge was lack of availability, as system downtime has a major impact on us," said Anna Gu, Network Engineer, Shanghai American School. "Some temporary interruptions, such as the failure of the power supply, usually did not last long, but some core services were failing frequently and took several hours to recover. Even planned downtime for system upgrades required complex, manual backup procedures, and systems were unavailable during the backup process."
Novell Solution
Shanghai American School looked for a full disaster recovery solution at a commercially acceptable price, and selected PlateSpin Forge from Novell. The Novell® solution compared favourably with competing offerings in terms of price and ease of implementation.
PlateSpin Forge is a disaster recovery appliance - a combined package of hardware and software that automatically keeps a continual backup of production systems. If the main hardware fails, all services can be restarted almost immediately on PlateSpin Forge.
"It was quick and easy to deploy PlateSpin Forge," said Gu. "In the past when we had implemented a backup or disaster recovery solution, we needed to buy specific hardware, often with relatively high performance demands; some solutions required that the hardware should be identical to the previous server. PlateSpin Forge isn't sensitive to the hardware it protects, which also makes it a very cost-effective solution."
With PlateSpin Forge in place, Shanghai American School has a simple and compact disaster recovery solution, and is able to run full disaster recovery tests once a week. The solution protects against loss of data and ensures minimal disruption to normal processes in the event of a failure on the primary server hardware.
"PlateSpin Forge delivers genuine peace of mind: we no longer worry about the impact of downtime," said Gu. "The software has an easy-to-use graphical interface, and with just a few hours of training we learned how to configure, implement and test the service."
PlateSpin Forge not only protects against unforeseen failures, it also simplifies and removes risk from server maintenance and upgrades. Where previously the IT team would have needed to shut down services to perform routine maintenance, it can now temporarily move users to PlateSpin Forge, upgrade or repair the primary server, then switch users back again.
Results
The combination of unplanned outages and planned system maintenance was causing unwanted downtime at Shanghai American School and affecting its ability to serve all the users. By deploying PlateSpin Forge from Novell, the organisation gained a compact, efficient and easy-to-manage disaster recovery solution that also minimises planned maintenance downtime.
"The cost for the alternative approach - moving entire systems and applications to new hardware in a failover data centre - would have been extremely high," said Gu. "PlateSpin Forge ensures stability without the expense and complexity of a duplicate data centre. As a packaged solution, we can configure it once and then rely on it to keep protecting our servers with minimal maintenance."
The increasing use of Web-based services was one of the key drivers for improving disaster recovery capabilities at Shanghai American School. In the past, it was acceptable to ensure that servers were always running during the normal school day, leaving significant windows for maintenance. Now that parents may log in from all over the world to check their child's progress, the School must effectively offer a round-the-clock service. PlateSpin Forge helps the organisation protect against unplanned downtime, ensuring that services are always available.
"Students, staff and parents all have high expectations of technology, and it is important for our good reputation that we meet these expectations," said Gu. "By enabling the rapid recovery of key services in the event of a disaster, PlateSpin Forge acts like an insurance policy for the School, helping to ensure continuity in our operations."