AuctioneeradoptsinnovativeopensourceprojectwithIBM,AcronisandRedHattoreducecostsandprotectreal-timeonlineauctionbids
SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, October 2,2013 - Acronis®, a leading provider of data
protection solutions, announced a collaboration with Quru,IBM and Red Hat to implement an open source
system with disaster recovery capabilities on the IT infrastructure
of Bonhams Auction House, one of the UK's oldest and most
successful auctioneers.
Bonhams Auction House has been selling thousands of priceless
antiques all over the world for more than 200 years, achieving
record-breaking prices for Keats' original
manuscripts and recently selling the most expensive car in
history, Fangio's Mercedes
for $29,650,095. With action houses in London, Paris, New York, San
Francisco and Los Angeles, operating 24/7 is a key part of its
success. However, to do this mission critical activity and ensure
that it remains operational should a disaster occur, the
organisation needed to update its IT systems within two of its US
data centres.
However, as with so many other medium-sized enterprises, the cost of achieving minimal downtime through traditional IT models and data protection strategies was becoming unaffordable. Bonhams turned to its partner Quru, a UK-based IBM Partner, to help it resolve the issue by developing and delivering a cost-effective, open-source approach with a reliable data protection solution from Acronis for its backup.
"We migrated Bonhams over to open source software for the
foundation of the upgrade and to standardise diverse platforms.
This dramatically reduced licensing costs and enabled new disaster
recover capabilities that would have been prohibitively expensive
on proprietary systems," said Roland Whitehead, CEO of Quru. "By
moving to an open source system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, with KVM technology, Bonhams
was able to reduce the number of servers required by 75 percent
from 35 to 8. The solution would have been 40 percent more
expensive had Bonhams used a VMware-based approach, based on
licensing costs and ongoing support."
In order to maintain the integrity and availability of real-time
transactional data the Auction House also needed to improve
disaster recovery measures for the data centres based in New York
and San Francisco. Acronis
Backup & Recovery® was chosen to support these new systems and
machines that Bonhams relies on daily.
"We have limited technical staff in the U.S., so we needed
something that could be managed from another location," said Simon
Chiu, Bonhams' senior systems engineer in San Francisco. "Using
Acronis, we are able to take live snapshots of our virtual machines
and back them up at either site and synchronise those backup files
to each data centre. So, in the event of a catastrophic failure at
either site, we can quickly restore the virtual machine from the
most recent backup, and all services will be up and running within
hours instead of days."
"Without these open source solutions, Bonhams would never have
been able to implement a disaster recovery system," said Roland
Whitehead, CEO of Quru. "The open source system has provided a cost
effective and robust computing platform for Bonhams, at a price
that the organisation - and many other companies - can afford."
"We have built a platform that works seamlessly across
Linux-based virtual environments and provides multiple targets -
tape, disk and cloud. Our close development relationships with IBM
and Red Hat have been pivotal in helping customers like Bonhams
achieve such impressive efficiencies," said Dmitri Joukovski,
senior vice president, product management, Acronis.
Specs and details:
· To add efficiency and stability to its operations,
Bonhams consolidated 34 servers in its New York and San Francisco
offices down to eight IBM System x3650 class servers. These servers
are used as virtualisation hosts in a Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualisation version 3.1 cluster-enabling secure remote
management of IT assets and full support for a worldwide
disaster-recovery strategy. The servers run Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualisation Hypervisor, and the infrastructure is managed by
just two Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Managers running on
dedicated IBM System x3550 servers, one in each location.
· Bonham's is able to perform seamless backups of its
virtualised environment with the use of Acronis Backup & Recovery
Virtual Edition to back up the IBM servers at each site and
replicate the backup data to the other locations.
Read the full case study here:
Bonhams Auction House Banishes Antique Servers.
Tweet This: Bonhams auction house protected and prepped for
future of online auction bids with Acronis, IBM and Red Hat
http://tinyurl.com/d23kdza
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Formoreinformation:
Contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or
visit us at: www.ibm.com/systems/x
For more information about IBM and KVM, visit:
www.ibm.com/systems/virtualization/kvm
For more information about Acronis virtualisation solutions
visit: www.acronis.com/virtualization
For more information about IBM Business Partner Quru, visit:
www.quru.com
For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation,
visit: http://www.redhat.com/products/cloud-computing/virtualization/
AboutBonhams
Founded in 1793, Bonhams is a privately owned British auction
house and one of the world's oldest and largest auctioneers of fine
art and antiques. The Bonhams name is known worldwide throughout
all sectors of the fine art, antiques and collectors markets, with
several departments regarded as leaders within their specialist
category. Based in London, Bonhams has salerooms in Paris, New
York,San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Sydney, as well as a
worldwide network of offices in 25 countries.
AboutQuru
Quru enables organisations to utilise the most appropriate blend
of open source and proprietary technologies to maximise the
effectiveness of their IT infrastructure and be better prepared to
meet today's business challenges. Quru is a market leader in the
technical design, development, deployment and support of open
source based solutions that help organisations to reduce costs and
increase operational agility and capability.
Our focus is on developing and deploying inspired
enterprise-class, award-winning solutions across key areas -
business software product development, complex web applications and
mobile apps - together with grid, messaging, and distributed
filesystem and virtualisation technologies.
AboutRedHat,Inc.
Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software
solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and
high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and
virtualisation technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning
support, training, and consulting services. As the connective hub
in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source
communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies
that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the
future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.
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RedHat®,the Red Hat
"Shadow Man"logo, and all Red Hat-based
trademarks and logos are trademarks or
registeredtrademarksofRedHat,Inc.intheU.S.andothercountries.
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orboth.
About Acronis:
Acronis is a leader in AI-native cyber protection, unifying data protection, cybersecurity, IT operations and hybrid infrastructure to deliver business continuity, security and compliance with less cost and complexity. More than 21,000 service providers trust Acronis to protect over 750,000 businesses in 150 countries. Acronis is headquartered in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. For more information, visit www.acronis.com.