The nature of enterprise technology is such that, despite the best precautions of man, it can and does occasionally fail. When that happens, it isn’t the failure itself that determines the outcome, but rather the response to it. And that’s why Victor Yukich, Managing Director of Eurotec, chooses Verde Group to look after his ERP solution.
Picture this. It’s late in December, it has been a long and hard year, Christmas has just been and even the thoughts of those who aren’t already on leave have turned to the holidays. All is well in the world…except, as importer and distributor of control and instrumentation equipment Eurotec suddenly discovered, it isn’t.
One of its Greentree Optimised GO Servers went down and along with it, the company’s operational systems. Yukich explains what made this a particularly thorny issue: “It couldn’t have happened at a worse time of the year, as only holiday resources were available.”
Steve Lewin, Verde senior consultant, was on deck and immediately sprang into action. “At the time, we weren’t quite sure why the server died, but suspected a power supply problem,” he relates. While Lewin confirms that the GO Server is generally a highly dependable bit of kit, he adds that even if it fails, sorting things out is generally a matter of simply swapping out the downed machine with a replacement. “It went down first thing in the morning and we had to get a new one in as soon as possible. We have backup servers in our office, so, with one of our consultants on board in Auckland, we grabbed that one and headed over to Eurotec.” By pulling the drives from the failed machine and installing them into the new one, Eurotec’s business was back up and running within a matter of hours. At the same time, adds Lewin, the Datasure backup was updated to ensure that there was no loss of information throughout the incident.
The actual intervention, he says, took just half an hour, while the complete incident from failure to ‘business as usual’ was resolved within half a day. Yukich has praise for the professional way in which the issue was taken care of. “With the lead from Steve Lewin and assistance from Greg Carr and Simon Angland we were running on the DR system within half a day and running on a replacement unit by the end of the next day – great effort!”
Lewin says that generally, the GO Servers are very reliable so it is unusual to have problems. “Our policy is to automatically replace them every two years so they are always in tip top condition, but this incident showed that failures aren’t impossible. However, with the Datasure backup and the ability to rapidly change a machine out, business impact is absolutely minimised,” he concluded.
ABOUT EUROTEC LTD
Eurotec was established in 1985 as importer/distributor of controls and instrumentation for the HVAC, Refrigeration, and Electrical industries. It’s network spans the breadth of New Zealand with offices in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
Read the Eurotec Ltd case study.
For more information about Eurotec Ltd visit www.eurotec.co.nz
